“Biomedical Event Causal Relation Extraction (BECRE) is an important task in biomedical infor-mation extraction. Existing methods usually use pre-trained language models to learn semanticrepresentations and then predict the event causal relation. However, these methods struggle tocapture sufficient cues in biomedical texts for predicting causal relations. In this paper, we pro-pose a Path Reasoning-based Relation-aware Network (PRRN) to explore deeper cues for causalrelations using reinforcement learning. Specifically, our model reasons the relation paths betweenentity arguments of two events, namely entity relation path, which connects the two biomedicalevents through the multi-hop interactions between entities to provide richer cues for predictingevent causal relations. In PRRN, we design a path reasoning module based on reinforcementlearning and propose a novel reward function to encourage the model to focus on the length andcontextual relevance of entity relation paths. The experimental results on two datasets suggestthat PRRN brings considerable improvements over the state-of-the-art models.Introduction”

Few-shot Event Detection (FSED) is a meaningful task due to the limited labeled data and expensive manual labeling. Some prompt-based methods are used in FSED. However, these methods require large GPU memory due to the increased length of input tokens caused by concatenating prompts, as well as additional human effort for designing verbalizers. Moreover, they ignore instance and prompt biases arising from the confounding effects between prompts and texts. In this paper, we propose a prototype-based prompt-instance Interaction with causal Intervention (2xInter) model to conveniently utilize both prompts and verbalizers and effectively eliminate all biases. Specifically, 2xInter first presents a Prototype-based Prompt-Instance Interaction (PPII) module that applies an interactive approach for texts and prompts to reduce memory and regards class prototypes as verbalizers to avoid design costs. Next, 2xInter constructs a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to explain instance and prompt biases and designs a Double-View Causal Intervention (DVCI) module to eliminate these biases. Due to limited supervised information, DVCI devises a generation-based prompt adjustment for instance intervention and a Siamese network-based instance contrasting for prompt intervention. Finally, the experimental results show that 2xInter achieves state-of-the-art performance on RAMS and ACE datasets.