Papers with Event Causality Identification
Event Causality Identification via Generation of Important Context Words (2022.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Prior work focused on identifying causal relation between two event mentions . current models do not output important contexts for causal prediction of two mentions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use dependency path generation as a complementary task for ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate both causal relation and dependency path words from input sentences. |
In-context Contrastive Learning for Event Causality Identification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent prompt learning-based approaches have shown promising improvements on the ECI task . however, they are subject to the delicate design of multiple prompts and positive correlations between the main task and derivate tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an event causality identification model that uses contrastive learning to enhance both positive and negative demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the event-related causality identification task . it uses contrastive learning to enhance both positive and negative demonstrations . |
Advancing Event Causality Identification via Heuristic Semantic Dependency Inquiry Network (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ECI rely on causal features and external knowledge, but these methods fail in two dimensions: causal features between events in texts often lack explicit clues and external information may introduce bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple and effective Semantic Dependency Inquiry Network for ECI that captures semantic dependencies within the context using a unified encoder and generates a fill-in token based on comprehensive context understanding. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that SemDI surpasses state-of-the-art methods on three widely used benchmarks. |
Event Causality Extraction with Event Argument Correlations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Event Causality Identification (ECI) ignores crucial event structure and cause-effect component information, making it struggle for downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to extract event causality pairs with their structured event information from plain text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures the intra- and inter-event argument correlations for ECE and provides several future directions. |
MECI: A Multilingual Dataset for Event Causality Identification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Event Causality Identification (ECI) is a task of detecting causal relations between events mentioned in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual dataset that provides consistent annotations for event causality relations in five languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides consistent annotation guidelines for five languages . the dataset can provide ample research challenges and directions for future research . |
Identifying while Learning for Document Event Causality Identification (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on causality existence, but ignore causal direction. |
| Approach: | They propose a new *identifying while learning* mode for the ECI task that takes care of the causal direction and updates events’ representations for boosting next round of causality identification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets. |
Mitigating Causal Bias in LLMs via Potential Outcomes Framework and Actual Causality Theory (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit significant causal hallucination, but evaluation of their document-level ECI performance is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to evaluate their document-level ECI performance . they propose a framework to mitigate the causal bias associated with using LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces the causal bias associated with using LLMs on ECI while also achieving superior performance. |
Graph Convolutional Networks for Event Causality Identification with Rich Document-level Structures (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level Event Causality Identification (ECI) are limited to intra-sentence contexts where event mention pairs are presented in the same sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep learning model that accepts inter-sentence event mention pairs . they use interaction graphs to capture relevant connections between important objects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets. |
SEAG: Structure-Aware Event Causality Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhengwei Tao, Zhi Jin, Xiaoying Bai, Haiyan Zhao, Chengfeng Dou, Yongqiang Zhao, Fang Wang, Chongyang Tao
| Challenge: | Current methods for extracting event causality are limited by the lack of cross-task dependencies and may cause error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for Structure-Aware Event Causality Generation (SEAG) they generate the ECG structure using a pre-trained language model and perform structural discriminative training alongside auto-regressive generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in extracting event causality from text. |
Distill, Fuse, Pre-train: Towards Effective Event Causality Identification with Commonsense-Aware Pre-trained Model (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect causal relationships in unstructured texts ignore trivial knowledge which may prejudice performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to build a commonsense-aware pre-trained model which integrates reliable task-specific knowledge from commonsens graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline integrates reliable task-specific knowledge from commonsense graphs. |
Enhancing Event Causality Identification with LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify causal relationships between events often overlook the dependencies between similar events. |
| Approach: | They propose an ECI method enhanced by LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations (LKCER) the method constructs a conceptual-level heterogeneous event graph by leveraging local contextual information of related event mentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both benchmarks, EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank. |
Semantic Structure Enhanced Event Causality Identification (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Event Causality Identification (ECI) capture implicit associations between events, which are difficult because they lack the ability to understand the associations between two events. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that captures the implicit associations between two events and integrates the event-centric structure information into a GNN-based event aggregator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three widely used datasets showing that it integrates event-centric and event-associated semantic elements and captures event associations. |
Dr.ECI: Infusing Large Language Models with Causal Knowledge for Decomposed Reasoning in Event Causality Identification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions lack generalizability to unseen domains, underscoring the urgent need for generalization capabilities in the field of ECI. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Decomposed reasoning framework for Event Causality Identification that incorporates specialized agents such as Causal Explorer and Mediator Detector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the state-of-the-art performance of LLMs for event causality identification (ECI) tasks compared with baselines based on LLM and supervised training. |
Hierarchical Selection of Important Context for Generative Event Causality Identification with Optimal Transports (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Event Causality Identification (ECI) rely on external toolkits or human annotation to obtain training signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that leverages Optimal Transport to automatically select the most important sentences and words from full documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict causal relation between two events in text without external tools. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving document-level DECI with low-resourced languages under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning for zero-shot cross-lingual ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on monolingual and multilingual scenarios by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score. |
SERE: Structural Example Retrieval for Enhancing LLMs in Event Causality Identification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various NLP tasks, but their effectiveness in ECI remains limited due to biases in causal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a structural example retrieval framework that leverages LLMs’ few-shot learning capabilities to help LLM models in ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages LLMs’ few-shot learning capabilities to guide LLM models in causal reasoning, mitigating bias and improving accuracy. |
Reframing Responsibility: Framing-Aware Event Causality Identification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Causal explanations in political narratives are often framed and contested. |
| Approach: | They propose a framing-aware extension of ECI that models causal explanations as structured claims including responsibility targets, evaluative frams, source type, and epistemic modality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables quantitative analysis of divergent causal attribution across narratives. |