Think out Loud: Emotion Deducing Explanation in Dialogues

Abstract: Humans convey emotions through daily dialogues, making emotion understanding a crucial step of affective intelligence. To understand emotions in dialogues, machines are asked to recognize the emotion for an utterance (Emotion Recognition in Dialogues, ERD); based on the emotion, then find causal utterances for the emotion (Emotion Cause Extraction in Dialogues, ECED). The setting of the two tasks requires first ERD and then ECED, ignoring the mutual complement between emotion and cause. To fix this, some new tasks are proposed to extract them simultaneously. Although the current research on these tasks has excellent achievements, simply identifying emotion-related factors by classification modeling lacks realizing the specific thinking process of causes stimulating the emotion in an explainable way. This thinking process especially reflected in the reasoning ability of LLMs is under-explored. To this end, we propose a new task "Emotion Deducing Explanation in Dialogues" (EDEN). EDEN recognizes emotion and causes in an explicitly thinking way. That is, models need to generate an explanation text, which first summarizes the causes; analyzes the inner activities of the speakers triggered by the causes using common sense; then guesses the emotion accordingly. To support the study of EDEN, based on the existing resources in ECED, we construct two EDEN datasets by human effort. We further evaluate different models on EDEN and find that LLMs are more competent than conventional PLMs. Besides, EDEN can help LLMs achieve better recognition of emotions and causes, which explores a new research direction of explainable emotion understanding in dialogues.