Characterizing and Verifying Scientific Claims: Qualitative Causal Structure is All You Need

Jinxuan Wu, Wenhan Chao, Xian Zhou, Zhunchen Luo


Abstract
A scientific claim typically begins with the formulation of a research question or hypothesis, which is a tentative statement or proposition about a phenomenon or relationship between variables. Within the realm of scientific claim verification, considerable research efforts have been dedicated to attention architectures and leveraging the text comprehension capabilities of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), yielding promising performances. However, these models overlook the causal structure information inherent in scientific claims, thereby failing to establish a comprehensive chain of causal inference. This paper delves into the exploration to highlight the crucial role of qualitative causal structure in characterizing and verifying scientific claims based on evidence. We organize the qualitative causal structure into a heterogeneous graph and propose a novel attention-based graph neural network model to facilitate causal reasoning across relevant causally-potent factors. Our experiments demonstrate that by solely utilizing the qualitative causal structure, the proposed model achieves comparable performance to PLM-based models. Furthermore, by incorporating semantic features, our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches comprehensively.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.828
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13428–13439
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.828
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.828
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinxuan Wu, Wenhan Chao, Xian Zhou, and Zhunchen Luo. 2023. Characterizing and Verifying Scientific Claims: Qualitative Causal Structure is All You Need. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13428–13439, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Characterizing and Verifying Scientific Claims: Qualitative Causal Structure is All You Need (Wu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.828.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.828.mp4