Junhu Wang

Shining Liang, Wanli Zuo, Zhenkun Shi et al.

Mining causality from text is a complex and crucial natural language understanding task corresponding to the human cognition. Existing studies at its solution can be grouped into two primary categories: feature engineering based and neural model based methods. In this paper, we find that the former has incomplete coverage and inherent errors but provide prior knowledge; while the latter leverages context information but causal inference of which is insufficiency. To handle the limitations, we propose a novel causality detection model named MCDN to explicitly model causal reasoning process, and furthermore, to exploit the advantages of both methods. Specifically, we adopt multi-head self-attention to acquire semantic feature at word level and develop the SCRN to infer causality at segment level. To the best of our knowledge, with regards to the causality tasks, this is the first time that the Relation Network is applied. The experimental results show that: 1) the proposed approach performs prominent performance on causality detection; 2) further analysis manifests the effectiveness and robustness of MCDN.

Humayun Kayesh, Md. Saiful Islam, Junhu Wang

Nowadays, Twitter has become a great source of user-generated information about events. Very often people report causal relationships between events in their tweets. Automatic detection of causality information in these events might play an important role in predictive event analytics. Existing approaches include both rule-based and data-driven supervised methods. However, it is challenging to correctly identify event causality using only linguistic rules due to the highly unstructured nature and grammatical incorrectness of social media short text such as tweets. Also, it is difficult to develop a data-driven supervised method for event causality detection in tweets due to insufficient contextual information. This paper proposes a novel event context word extension technique based on background knowledge. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed event context word extension technique, we develop a feed-forward neural network based approach to detect event causality from tweets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach.