Causal News Corpus

This repository contains the datasets and models for the Causal News Corpus (CNC). Our dataset is published in the following works:

• 2023 IJCNLP-AACL: "RECESS: Resource for Extracting Cause, Effect, and Signal Spans"
• 2023 CASE @ RANLP: "Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus - Shared Task 3, CASE 2023"
• 2022 LREC: "The Causal News Corpus: Annotating Causal Relations in Event Sentences from News"
• 2022 CASE @ EMNLP: "Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus - Shared Task 3, CASE 2022". Please find citations at the bottom of this page.

CNC works on two subtasks:

Subtask 1: Causal Event Classification -- Does an event sentence contain any cause-effect meaning?
Subtask 2: Cause-Effect-Signal Span Detection -- Which consecutive spans correspond to cause, effect or signal per causal sentence? (Annotation in progress)

Causality is a core cognitive concept and appears in many natural language processing (NLP) works that aim to tackle inference and understanding. Generally, a causal relation is a semantic relationship between two arguments known as cause and effect, in which the occurrence of one (cause argument) causes the occurrence of the other (effect argument). The Figure below illustrates some sentences that are marked as Causal and Non-causal respectively.

Annotated examples from Causal News Corpus. Causes are in pink, Effects in green and Signals in yellow. Note that both Cause and Effect spans must be present within one and the same sentence for us to mark it as Causal.

Shared Task

We have hosted two iterations of the shared task, known as "Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus".

Participate here!!! (Please use "V2" data)

• 2023 Codalab Additional Scoring Page

Links to relevant documentation and previous competition page are as follows:

• Proceedings on ACL (@ RANLP 2023) [To be added!]
• 2023 Final Leaderboard
• Proceedings on ACL (@ EMNLP 2022)
• 2022 Final Leaderboard

Subtask 1: Causal Event Classification

Data:

Datasets are available under the data folder. For 2023 Shared Task, please use V2. Target column: label

Running BERT baseline:

Given a <train.csv> and <val.csv> file with columns index,text,label (label values should be in 0,1 int format), use our run_st1.py script to train, evaluate and predict using --do_train, --do_eval and --do_predict flags respectively.

sudo python3 run_st1.py \
--task_name cola --train_file <train.csv> --do_train \
--validation_file <val.csv> --do_eval \
--test_file <val.csv> --do_predict \
--num_train_epochs 10 --save_steps 50000 \
--per_device_train_batch_size 32 \
--per_device_eval_batch_size 32 \
--model_name_or_path bert-base-cased \
--output_dir outs --overwrite_output_dir

Further experiments are also available in run_st1.sh for reference. Within which, we also conducted experiments with the two external corpus (CTB and PDTB V3.0). More details are described in our paper.

KFolds script is available in kfolds.sh which creates user-specified number of fold sets and runs the Train and Eval function over each fold. In our paper, we set K=5.

For V2 dev: This baseline corresponds to Codalab submission by "tanfiona". This uses the bert-base-cased model.

#	User	Date of Last Entry	Recall	Precision	F1	Accuracy	MCC
1	tanfiona	07/05/23	0.8865	0.8410	0.8632	0.8471	0.6913

For V1 dev: This baseline corresponds to Codalab submission by "tanfiona". For LSTM baseline, submissions are by "hansih".

#	User	Date of Last Entry	Recall	Precision	F1	Accuracy	MCC
1	tanfiona	03/23/22	0.8652	0.8063	0.8347	0.8111	0.6172
2	hansih	03/13/22	0.7303	0.7514	0.7407	0.7183	0.4326

Subtask 2: Cause-Effect-Signal Span Detection

Data:

Datasets are available under the data folder. For 2023 Shared Task, please use V2. Target column: causal_text_w_pairs

To avoid revealing causal annotations for Subtask 1, we will be receiving span predictions on ALL sentences that tallies with the _grouped format. However, in evaluation, we only evaluate against the available annotated CAUSAL sentences. See Subtask 2's evaluation folder for more information.

Running 1Cademy baseline:

Given a <train.csv>, <val.csv> and <test.csv> files, use our run_st2.py script to train+evaluate and predict using --do_train and --do_test flags respectively.

python run_st2.py \
  --dropout 0.3 \
  --learning_rate 2e-05 \
  --model_name_or_path albert-xxlarge-v2 \
  --num_train_epochs 10 \
  --num_warmup_steps 200 \
  --output_dir "outs/baseline" \
  --per_device_train_batch_size 8 \
  --per_device_eval_batch_size 8 \
  --per_device_test_batch_size 8 \
  --report_to wandb \
  --task_name ner \
  --do_train --do_test \
  --train_file <train.csv> \
  --validation_file <val.csv> \
  --test_file <test.csv> \
  --weight_decay 0.005 \
  --use_best_model

Further experiments are also available in run_st2.sh for reference. Within which, we also generate augments, provided in the data folder. This baseline corresponds to Codalab submission by "tanfiona".

For V2 dev: This baseline corresponds to Codalab submission by "tanfiona".

#	User	Date of Last Entry	Recall	Precision	F1
1	tanfiona	05/01/23	0.6632	0.5948	0.6271

For an alternate starting model, consider adapting the token classification baseline model from Huggingface's run_ner_no_trainer.py script. The best submission for this task so far is by BoschAI in 2023, F1=72.79%. Please refer to their repository for their model.

Cite Us

If you used this repository or our corpus, please do cite us as follows:

@inproceedings{tan-etal-2023-recess,
    title = "{RECESS}: Resource for Extracting Cause, Effect, and Signal Spans",
    author = {Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      H{\"u}rriyeto{\u{g}}lu, Ali  and
      Oostdijk, Nelleke  and
      Caselli, Tommaso  and
      Nomoto, Tadashi  and
      Uca, Onur  and
      Liza, Farhana Ferdousi  and
      Ng, See-Kiong},
    editor = "Park, Jong C.  and
      Arase, Yuki  and
      Hu, Baotian  and
      Lu, Wei  and
      Wijaya, Derry  and
      Purwarianti, Ayu  and
      Krisnadhi, Adila Alfa",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Nusa Dua, Bali",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.ijcnlp-main.6",
    pages = "66--82",
    abstract = "Causality expresses the relation between two arguments, one of which represents the cause and the other the effect (or consequence). Causal relations are fundamental to human decision making and reasoning, and extracting them from natural language texts is crucial for building effective natural language understanding models. However, the scarcity of annotated corpora for causal relations poses a challenge in the development of such tools. Thus, we created Resource for Extracting Cause, Effect, and Signal Spans (RECESS), a comprehensive corpus annotated for causality at different levels, including Cause, Effect, and Signal spans. The corpus contains 3,767 sentences, of which, 1,982 are causal sentences that contain a total of 2,754 causal relations. We report baseline experiments on two natural language tasks (Causal Sentence Classification, and Cause-Effect-Signal Span Detection), and establish initial benchmarks for future work. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the corpus and the properties of causal relations in text. RECESS is a valuable resource for developing and evaluating causal relation extraction models, benefiting researchers working on topics from information retrieval to natural language understanding and inference.",
}

@inproceedings{tan-etal-2023-event-causality,
    title = "Event Causality Identification - Shared Task 3, {CASE} 2023",
    author = {Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      H{\"u}rriyeto{\u{g}}lu, Ali  and
      Oostdijk, Nelleke  and
      Uca, Onur  and
      Thapa, Surendrabikram  and
      Liza, Farhana Ferdousi},
    editor = {H{\"u}rriyeto{\u{g}}lu, Ali  and
      Tanev, Hristo  and
      Zavarella, Vanni  and
      Yeniterzi, Reyyan  and
      Y{\"o}r{\"u}k, Erdem  and
      Slavcheva, Milena},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text",
    month = sep,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Varna, Bulgaria",
    publisher = "INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.case-1.19",
    pages = "144--150",
    abstract = "The Event Causality Identification Shared Task of CASE 2023 is the second iteration of a shared task centered around the Causal News Corpus. Two subtasks were involved: In Subtask 1, participants were challenged to predict if a sentence contains a causal relation or not. In Subtask 2, participants were challenged to identify the Cause, Effect, and Signal spans given an input causal sentence. For both subtasks, participants uploaded their predictions for a held-out test set, and ranking was done based on binary F1 and macro F1 scores for Subtask 1 and 2, respectively. This paper includes an overview of the work of the ten teams that submitted their results to our competition and the six system description papers that were received. The highest F1 scores achieved for Subtask 1 and 2 were 84.66{\%} and 72.79{\%}, respectively.",
}

@inproceedings{tan-etal-2022-causal,
    title = "The Causal News Corpus: Annotating Causal Relations in Event Sentences from News",
    author = {Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      H{\"u}rriyeto{\u{g}}lu, Ali  and
      Caselli, Tommaso  and
      Oostdijk, Nelleke  and
      Nomoto, Tadashi  and
      Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      Ameer, Iqra  and
      Uca, Onur  and
      Liza, Farhana Ferdousi  and
      Hu, Tiancheng},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
    month = jun,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.246",
    pages = "2298--2310",
    abstract = "Despite the importance of understanding causality, corpora addressing causal relations are limited. There is a discrepancy between existing annotation guidelines of event causality and conventional causality corpora that focus more on linguistics. Many guidelines restrict themselves to include only explicit relations or clause-based arguments. Therefore, we propose an annotation schema for event causality that addresses these concerns. We annotated 3,559 event sentences from protest event news with labels on whether it contains causal relations or not. Our corpus is known as the Causal News Corpus (CNC). A neural network built upon a state-of-the-art pre-trained language model performed well with 81.20{\%} F1 score on test set, and 83.46{\%} in 5-folds cross-validation. CNC is transferable across two external corpora: CausalTimeBank (CTB) and Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB). Leveraging each of these external datasets for training, we achieved up to approximately 64{\%} F1 on the CNC test set without additional fine-tuning. CNC also served as an effective training and pre-training dataset for the two external corpora. Lastly, we demonstrate the difficulty of our task to the layman in a crowd-sourced annotation exercise. Our annotated corpus is publicly available, providing a valuable resource for causal text mining researchers.",
}

@inproceedings{tan-etal-2022-event,
    title = "Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus - Shared Task 3, {CASE} 2022",
    author = {Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      H{\"u}rriyeto{\u{g}}lu, Ali  and
      Caselli, Tommaso  and
      Uca, Onur  and
      Liza, Farhana Ferdousi  and
      Oostdijk, Nelleke},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.case-1.28",
    pages = "195--208",
    abstract = "The Event Causality Identification Shared Task of CASE 2022 involved two subtasks working on the Causal News Corpus. Subtask 1 required participants to predict if a sentence contains a causal relation or not. This is a supervised binary classification task. Subtask 2 required participants to identify the Cause, Effect and Signal spans per causal sentence. This could be seen as a supervised sequence labeling task. For both subtasks, participants uploaded their predictions for a held-out test set, and ranking was done based on binary F1 and macro F1 scores for Subtask 1 and 2, respectively. This paper summarizes the work of the 17 teams that submitted their results to our competition and 12 system description papers that were received. The best F1 scores achieved for Subtask 1 and 2 were 86.19{\%} and 54.15{\%}, respectively. All the top-performing approaches involved pre-trained language models fine-tuned to the targeted task. We further discuss these approaches and analyze errors across participants{'} systems in this paper.",
}

Contact Us

• Fiona Anting Tan, tan.f[at]u.nus.edu
• Hansi Hettiarachchi, hansi.hettiarachchi[at]mail.bcu.ac.uk