One Unified Model for Diverse Tasks: Emotion Cause Analysis via Self-Promote Cognitive Structure Modeling

Zhaoxin Yu, Xinglin Xiao, Wenji Mao


Abstract
Emotion cause analysis is a critical topic in natural language processing. Key tasks include emotion cause extraction (ECE), emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE), social emotion cause identification (SECI) as well as social emotion mining and its cause identification (SEMCI). While current emotion cause analysis methods often focus on task-specific model design, they tend to overlook the underlying common ground across these tasks rooted in cognitive emotion theories, in particular, the cognitive structure of emotions. Drawing inspiration from this theory, in this paper, we propose a unified model capable of tackling diverse emotion cause analysis tasks, which constructs the emotion cognitive structure through LLM-based in-context learning. To mitigate the hallucination inherent in LLMs, we introduce a self-promote mechanism built on iterative refinement. It dynamically assesses the reliability of substructures based on their cognitive consistency and leverages the more reliable substructures to promote the inconsistent ones. Experimental results on multiple emotion cause analysis tasks ECE, ECPE, SECI and SEMCI demonstrate the superiority of our unified model over existing SOTA methods and LLM-based baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.516
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10278–10293
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.516/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaoxin Yu, Xinglin Xiao, and Wenji Mao. 2025. One Unified Model for Diverse Tasks: Emotion Cause Analysis via Self-Promote Cognitive Structure Modeling. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10278–10293, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
One Unified Model for Diverse Tasks: Emotion Cause Analysis via Self-Promote Cognitive Structure Modeling (Yu et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.516.pdf