We study the task of span-level emotion cause analysis (SECA), which is focused on identifying the specific emotion cause span(s) triggering a certain emotion in the text. Compared to the popular clause-level emotion cause analysis (CECA), it is a finer-grained emotion cause analysis (ECA) task. In this paper, we design a BERT-based graph attention network for emotion cause span(s) identification. The proposed model takes advantage of the structure of BERT to capture the relationship information between emotion and text, and utilizes graph attention network to model the structure information of the text. Our SECA method can be easily used for extracting clause-level emotion causes for CECA as well. Experimental results show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ECA methods on benchmark emotion cause dataset.

This paper addresses the task of span-level emotion cause analysis (SECA). It is a finer-grained emotion cause analysis (ECA) task, which aims to identify the specific emotion cause span(s) behind certain emotions in text. In this paper, we formalize SECA as a sequence tagging task for which several variants of neural network-based sequence tagging models to extract specific emotion cause span(s) in the given context. These models combine different types of encoding and decoding approaches. Furthermore, to make our models more "emotionally sensitive'', we utilize the multi-head attention mechanism to enhance the representation of context. Experimental evaluations conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models.