Understanding narratives requires reasoning about the cause-and-effect relationships between events mentioned in the text. While existing foundation models yield impressive results in many NLP tasks requiring reasoning, it is unclear whether they understand the complexity of the underlying network of causal relationships of events in narratives. In this work, we present CRAB, a new Causal Reasoning Assessment Benchmark designed to evaluate causal understanding of events in real-world narratives. CRAB contains fine-grained, contextual causality annotations for ~2.7K pairs of real-world events that describe various newsworthy event timelines (e.g., the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk). Using CRAB, we measure the performance of several large language models, demonstrating that most systems achieve poor performance on the task. Motivated by classical causal principles, we also analyze the causal structures of groups of events in CRAB, and find that models perform worse on causal reasoning when events are derived from complex causal structures compared to simple linear causal chains. We make our dataset and code available to the research community.

This paper proposes a multilingual Automated Text Summarization (ATS) method targeting the Financial Narrative Summarization Task (FNS-2022). We developed two systems; the first uses a pre-trained abstractive summarization model that was fine-tuned on the downstream objective, the second approaches the problem as an extractive approach in which a similarity search is performed on the trained span representations. Both models aim to identify the beginning of the continuous narrative section of the document. The language models were fine-tuned on a financial document collection of three languages (English, Spanish, and Greek) and aim to identify the beginning of the summary narrative part of the document. The proposed systems achieve high performance in the given task, with the sequence-to-sequence variant ranked 1st on ROUGE-2 F1 score on the test set for each of the three languages.