Exploring Causal Directions through Word Occurrences: Semi-supervised Bayesian Classification Framework

King Tao Jason Ng, Diego Molla


Abstract
Determining causal directions in sentences plays a critical role into understanding a cause-and-effect relationship between entities. In this paper, we show empirically that word occurrences from several Internet domains resemble the characteristics of causal directions. Our research contributes to the knowledge of the underlying data generation process behind causal directions. We propose a two-phase method: 1. Bayesian framework, which generates synthetic data from posteriors by incorporating word occurrences from the Internet domains. 2. Pre-trained BERT, which utilises semantics of words based on the context to perform classification. The proposed method achieves an improvement in performance for the Cause-Effect relations of the SemEval-2010 dataset, when compared with random guessing.
Anthology ID:
2023.alta-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association
Month:
November
Year:
2023
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Vivian Chen, Kennington Casey, Vandyke David, Dethlefs Nina, Inoue Koji, Ekstedt Erik, Ultes Stefan
Venue:
ALTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alta-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
King Tao Jason Ng and Diego Molla. 2023. Exploring Causal Directions through Word Occurrences: Semi-supervised Bayesian Classification Framework. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association, pages 30–39, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Causal Directions through Word Occurrences: Semi-supervised Bayesian Classification Framework (Ng & Molla, ALTA 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alta-1.4.pdf