Dr.ECI: Infusing Large Language Models with Causal Knowledge for Decomposed Reasoning in Event Causality Identification

Ruichu Cai, Shengyin Yu, Jiahao Zhang, Wei Chen, Boyan Xu, Keli Zhang


Abstract
Despite the demonstrated potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in diverse NLP tasks, their causal reasoning capability appears inadequate when evaluated within the context of the event causality identification (ECI) task. The ECI tasks pose significant complexity for LLMs and necessitate comprehensive causal priors for accurate identification. To improve the performance of LLMs for causal reasoning, we propose a multi-agent Decomposed reasoning framework for Event Causality Identification, designated as Dr.ECI. In the discovery stage, Dr.ECI incorporates specialized agents such as Causal Explorer and Mediator Detector, which capture implicit causality and indirect causality more effectively. In the reasoning stage, Dr.ECI introduces the agents Direct Reasoner and Indirect Reasoner, which leverage the knowledge of the generalized causal structure specific to the ECI. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Dr.ECI comparing with baselines based on LLMs and supervised training. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/DMIRLAB-Group/Dr.ECI.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.628
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
9346–9375
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.628/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruichu Cai, Shengyin Yu, Jiahao Zhang, Wei Chen, Boyan Xu, and Keli Zhang. 2025. Dr.ECI: Infusing Large Language Models with Causal Knowledge for Decomposed Reasoning in Event Causality Identification. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 9346–9375, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dr.ECI: Infusing Large Language Models with Causal Knowledge for Decomposed Reasoning in Event Causality Identification (Cai et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.628.pdf