From Text to Structure: The PACKaGE Benchmark for Bidirectional Causal Reasoning in Paragraphs and Graphs

Juhyeon Kim, Dohun Lee, Jiwon Jang, Joseph Shim, Hyunwoo Park


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, yet they struggle with causal reasoning tasks. We introduce PACKaGE (Paragraph-level Annotated Causal Knowledge and Graph–tExt), a causal benchmark dataset that pairs paragraph-level texts with explicit causal graphs. Unlike prior sentence-level resources, our benchmark dataset (i) operates at paragraph level to capture various and interdependent causal pathways; (ii) offers multimodal annotations including full graphs and contextualized relations; and (iii) maps extended passages to comprehensive graphs. We detail a four-stage construction pipeline: collecting causality-labeled and fact-centric texts, inducing graphs from span-tagged pairs, condensing nodes, and recomposing path-aligned narratives. Overall, the paired evaluation highlights a persistent discrepancy between linguistic competence and causal understanding in LLMs, pointing to the need for further development.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
585–611
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.27/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Juhyeon Kim, Dohun Lee, Jiwon Jang, Joseph Shim, and Hyunwoo Park. 2026. From Text to Structure: The PACKaGE Benchmark for Bidirectional Causal Reasoning in Paragraphs and Graphs. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 585–611, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Text to Structure: The PACKaGE Benchmark for Bidirectional Causal Reasoning in Paragraphs and Graphs (Kim et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.27.pdf