Challenge: Existing studies on explainable fake news or rumour detection by and large use attention weights as explanation, but the use of attention weighted explanations is problematic.
Approach: They propose a causal mediation analysis approach to explain the decision-making process of neural models for rumour detection on Twitter by identifying salient tweets that explain model predictions and highlighting causally impactful words in the tweets.
Outcome: The proposed approach shows strong agreement with human judgements for critical tweets determining the truthfulness of stories.

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Challenge: Prior work has shown that multimodal prompts can be highly sensitive, where small adjustments might result in drastically different responses from the model.
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Causal Explanation Analysis on Social Media (D18-1)

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Challenge: Understanding causal explanations is an important psychological factor linked to physical and mental health.
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CausalNLP Tutorial: An Introduction to Causality for Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-tutorials)

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Challenge: Establishing causal relationships is a fundamental goal of scientific research . lack of clear definitions, notations, benchmark datasets, and challenges remains .
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How to Enhance Causal Discrimination of Utterances: A Case on Affective Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models excel at capturing semantic correlations within utterance embeddings but fail to determine specific causal relationships.
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Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Cognitive science and symbolic AI research suggest that event causality provides vital information for story understanding.
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Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimates (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Unmeasured or latent confounders can bias causal estimates and this has motivated interest in measuring potential confounder from observed text.
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CausalEval: Towards Better Causal Reasoning in Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have been used for a variety of tasks, including problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of the world.
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Exploiting Microblog Conversation Structures to Detect Rumors (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for rumor detection ignore the conversation structure of tweets . 68% of american adults occasionally read news on social media platforms . however, the credibility of news propagated through social media is questionable due to the lack of editors who can validate it.
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Challenge: Existing models for detecting offensive memes lack transparency and are often unreliability in safety-critical applications.
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CausalityCheck: A Framework for Evaluating Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation methods fail to accurately reflect a model's causal reasoning capabilities.
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