Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims at determining the existence of a causal relation between two events. Although recent prompt learning-based approaches have shown promising improvements on the ECI task, their performance are often subject to the delicate design of multiple prompts and the positive correlations between the main task and derivate tasks. The in-context learning paradigm provides explicit guidance for label prediction in the prompt learning paradigm, alleviating its reliance on complex prompts and derivative tasks. However, it does not distinguish between positive and negative demonstrations for analogy learning. Motivated from such considerations, this paper proposes an **I**n-**C**ontext **C**ontrastive **L**earning (ICCL) model that utilizes contrastive learning to enhance the effectiveness of both positive and negative demonstrations. Additionally, we apply contrastive learning to event pairs to better facilitate event causality identification. Our ICCL is evaluated on the widely used corpora, including the EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank, and results show significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Multifaceted ideology detection (MID) aims to detect the ideological leanings of texts towards multiple facets. Previous studies on ideology detection mainly focus on one generic facet and ignore label semantics and explanatory descriptions of ideologies, which are a kind of instructive information and reveal the specific concepts of ideologies. In this paper, we develop a novel concept semantics-enhanced framework for the MID task. Specifically, we propose a bidirectional iterative concept flow (BICo) method to encode multifaceted ideologies. BICo enables the concepts to flow across levels of the schema tree and enriches concept representations with multi-granularity semantics. Furthermore, we explore concept attentive matching and concept-guided contrastive learning strategies to guide the model to capture ideology features with the learned concept semantics. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in MID, including in the cross-topic scenario.

Existing script event prediction task forcasts the subsequent event based on an event script chain. However, the evolution of historical events are more complicated in real world scenarios and the limited information provided by the event script chain also make it difficult to accurately predict subsequent events. This paper introduces a Causality Graph Event Prediction(CGEP) task that forecasting consequential event based on an Event Causality Graph (ECG). We propose a Semantic Enhanced Distance-sensitive Graph Prompt Learning (SeDGPL) Model for the CGEP task. In SeDGPL, (1) we design a Distance-sensitive Graph Linearization (DsGL) module to reformulate the ECG into a graph prompt template as the input of a PLM; (2) propose an Event-Enriched Causality Encoding (EeCE) module to integrate both event contextual semantic and graph schema information; (3) propose a Semantic Contrast Event Prediction (ScEP) module to enhance the event representation among numerous candidate events and predict consequential event following prompt learning paradigm. Experiment results validate our argument our proposed SeDGPL model outperforms the advanced competitors for the CGEP task.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to detect whether there exists a causal relation between two events in a document. Existing studies adopt a kind of *identifying after learning* paradigm, where events’ representations are first learned and then used for the identification. Furthermore, they mainly focus on the causality existence, but ignoring causal direction. In this paper, we take care of the causal direction and propose a new *identifying while learning* mode for the ECI task. We argue that a few causal relations can be easily identified with high confidence, and the directionality and structure of these identified causalities can be utilized to update events’ representations for boosting next round of causality identification. To this end, this paper designs an *iterative learning and identifying framework*: In each iteration, we construct an event causality graph, on which events’ causal structure representations are updated for boosting causal identification. Experiments on two public datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in both evaluations for causality existence identification and direction identification.

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) aims at classifying the relation sense between two arguments without an explicit connective. Recently, the ConnPrompt (Xiang et al., 2022) has leveraged the powerful prompt learning for IDRR based on the fusion of multi-prompt decisions from three different yet much similar connective prediction templates. Instead of multi-prompt ensembling, we propose to design auxiliary tasks with enlightened prompt learning for the IDRR task. Although an auxiliary task is not used to directly output final prediction, we argue that during the joint training some of its learned features can be useful to boost the main task. In light of such motivations, we propose a task enlightenment prompt learning model, called TEPrompt, to fuse learned features from three related tasks for IDRR. In particular, the TEPrompt contains three tasks, viz., Discourse Relation Recognition (DRR), Sense Semantics Classification (SSC) and Annotated Connective Prediction (ACP), each with a unique prompt template and an answer space. In the training phase, we jointly train three prompt learning tasks with shared argument representation. In the testing phase, we only take the DRR output with fused features as the final IDRR decision. Experiments with the same conditions have shown that the proposed TEPrompt outperforms the ConnPrompt. This can be attributed to the promoted decision features and language models benefited from joint-training of auxiliary tasks.

Ideology detection (ID) is important for gaining insights about peoples’ opinions and stances on our world and society, which can find many applications in politics, economics and social sciences. It is not uncommon that a piece of text can contain descriptions of various issues. It is also widely accepted that a person can take different ideological stances in different facets. However, existing datasets for the ID task only label a text as ideologically left- or right-leaning as a whole, regardless whether the text containing one or more different issues. Moreover, most prior work annotates texts from data resources with known ideological bias through distant supervision approaches, which may result in many false labels. With some theoretical help from social sciences, this work first designs an ideological schema containing five domains and twelve facets for a new multifaceted ideology detection (MID) task to provide a more complete and delicate description of ideology. We construct a MITweet dataset for the MID task, which contains 12,594 English Twitter posts, each annotated with a Relevance and an Ideology label for all twelve facets. We also design and test a few of strong baselines for the MID task under in-topic and cross-topic settings, which can serve as benchmarks for further research.

Recently, prompt-tuning has attracted growing interests in event argument extraction (EAE). However, the existing prompt-tuning methods have not achieved satisfactory performance due to the lack of consideration of entity information. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional iterative prompt-tuning method for EAE, where the EAE task is treated as a cloze-style task to take full advantage of entity information and pre-trained language models (PLMs). Furthermore, our method explores event argument interactions by introducing the argument roles of contextual entities into prompt construction. Since template and verbalizer are two crucial components in a cloze-style prompt, we propose to utilize the role label semantic knowledge to construct a semantic verbalizer and design three kind of templates for the EAE task. Experiments on the ACE 2005 English dataset with standard and low-resource settings show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the peer state-of-the-art methods.

Prior studies use one attention mechanism to improve contextual semantic representation learning for implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR). However, diverse relation senses may benefit from different attention mechanisms. We also argue that some linguistic relation in between two words can be further exploited for IDRR. This paper proposes a Multi-Attentive Neural Fusion (MANF) model to encode and fuse both semantic connection and linguistic evidence for IDRR. In MANF, we design a Dual Attention Network (DAN) to learn and fuse two kinds of attentive representation for arguments as its semantic connection. We also propose an Offset Matrix Network (OMN) to encode the linguistic relations of word-pairs as linguistic evidence. Our MANF model achieves the state-of-the-art results on the PDTB 3.0 corpus.

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) is to detect and classify relation sense between two text segments without an explicit connective. Vanilla pre-train and fine-tuning paradigm builds upon a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) with a task-specific neural network. However, the task objective functions are often not in accordance with that of the PLM. Furthermore, this paradigm cannot well exploit some linguistic evidence embedded in the pre-training process. The recent pre-train, prompt, and predict paradigm selects appropriate prompts to reformulate downstream tasks, so as to utilizing the PLM itself for prediction. However, for its success applications, prompts, verbalizer as well as model training should still be carefully designed for different tasks. As the first trial of using this new paradigm for IDRR, this paper develops a Connective-cloze Prompt (ConnPrompt) to transform the relation prediction task as a connective-cloze task. Specifically, we design two styles of ConnPrompt template: Insert-cloze Prompt (ICP) and Prefix-cloze Prompt (PCP) and construct an answer space mapping to the relation senses based on the hierarchy sense tags and implicit connectives. Furthermore, we use a multi-prompt ensemble to fuse predictions from different prompting results. Experiments on the PDTB corpus show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms, even with fewer training data.