Emotion-Semantic-Aware Dual Contrastive Learning for Epistemic Emotion Identification of Learner-Generated Reviews in MOOCs

Identifying the epistemic emotions of learner-generated reviews in massive open online courses (MOOCs) can help instructors provide adaptive guidance and interventions for learners. The epistemic emotion identification task is a fine-grained identification task that contains multiple categories of emotions arising during the learning process. Previous studies only consider emotional or semantic information within the review texts alone, which leads to insufficient feature representation. In addition, some categories of epistemic emotions are ambiguously distributed in feature space, making them hard to be distinguished. In this article, we present an emotion-semantic-aware dual contrastive learning (ES-DCL) approach to tackle these issues. In order to learn sufficient feature representation, implicit semantic features and human-interpretable emotional features are, respectively, extracted from two different views to form complementary emotional-semantic features. On this basis, by leveraging the experience of domain experts and the input emotional-semantic features, two types of contrastive losses (label contrastive loss and feature contrastive loss) are formulated. They are designed to train the discriminative distribution of emotional-semantic features in the sample space and to solve the anisotropy problem between different categories of epistemic emotions. The proposed ES-DCL is compared with 11 other baseline models on four different disciplinary MOOCs review datasets. Extensive experimental results show that our approach improves the performance of epistemic emotion identification, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods in learning more discriminative sentence representations.