The ability to understand emotions is an essential component of human-like artificial intelligence, as emotions greatly influence human cognition, decision making, and social interactions. In addition to emotion recognition in conversations, the task of identifying the potential causes behind an individual’s emotional state in conversations, is of great importance in many application scenarios. We organize SemEval-2024 Task 3, named Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations, which aims at extracting all pairs of emotions and their corresponding causes from conversations. Under different modality settings, it consists of two subtasks: Textual Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (TECPE) and Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (MECPE). The shared task has attracted 143 registrations and 216 successful submissions.In this paper, we introduce the task, dataset and evaluation settings, summarize the systems of the top teams, and discuss the findings of the participants.

Emotion Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations (ECTEC) aims to simultaneously extract emotion utterances, emotion categories, and cause utterances from conversations. However, existing studies mainly decompose the ECTEC task into multiple subtasks and solve them in a pipeline manner. Moreover, since conversations tend to contain many informal and implicit expressions, it often requires external knowledge and reasoning-based inference to accurately identify emotional and causal clues implicitly mentioned in the context, which are ignored by previous work. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a commonSense knowledge-enHanced generAtive fRameworK named SHARK, which formulates the ECTEC task as an index generation problem and generates the emotion-cause-category triplets in an end-to-end manner with a sequence-to-sequence model. Furthermore, we propose to incorporate both retrieved and generated commonsense knowledge into the generative model via a dual-view gate mechanism and a graph attention layer. Experimental results show that our SHARK model consistently outperforms several competitive systems on two benchmark datasets. Our source codes are publicly released at https://github.com/NUSTM/SHARK.