@inproceedings{dong-etal-2026-epir,
    title = "{EPIR}: Capturing Promoting and Inhibiting Relationships between Events",
    author = "Dong, Bowen  and
      Wang, Wenjun  and
      Liu, Xueli  and
      Qiu, Quanlin",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1838/",
    pages = "36895--36910",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Understanding whether one event increases or decreases the likelihood of another is critical for real-life applications. Unlike other relationships, promoting and inhibiting relationships capture directional, probabilistic, and context-dependent shifts in event likelihood. A central challenge is to estimate this relative influence from observational data: naive conditional probabilities conflate influence with correlation and are easily distorted by shared contextual confounders. We propose EPIR, a unified framework for estimating promoting and inhibiting relationships from observed event data. EPIR formulates influence as a relative directional effect under comparable contextual conditions, and models event context using : (i) observable history captured and (ii) latent multi-hop propagation mechanisms. EPIR combines context-conditioned predictive evidence with schema-based structural evidence to produce a single signed influence score, where the sign determines promotion versus inhibition. Experiments on real-world datasets show that EPIR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy."
}