This paper aims to identify directional causal relations between events, including the existence and direction of causality. Previous studies mainly adopt prompt learning paradigm to predict a causal answer word based on a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) for causality existence identification. However, the indecision in selecting answer words from some synonyms and the confusion of indicating opposite causal directions with the same answer word raise more challenges in directional causality identification. Inspired by the strong capabilities of pre-trained Generative Language Models (GLMs) in generating responses or statements, we propose to instruct a GLM to generate causality statements and identify directional event causality by evaluating the generated statements. Specifically, we propose an Instructive Generation and Statement Evaluation method to identify both the existence and direction of causality. We first fine-tune a GLM to instructively generate causality statements based on event description inputs. Then, we evaluate the rationality of the generated statements to determine the existence and direction of event causalities. Experiments on the ESC and MAVEN datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, even with fewer training data.

“机器阅读理解(Machine Reading Comprehension, MRC)任务旨在让机器回答给定上下文的问题来测试机器理解自然语言的能力。目前,基于大规模预训练语言模型的神经机器阅读理解模型已经取得重要进展,但在涉及答案要素、线索要素和问题要素跨标点句、远距离关联时,答案抽取的准确率还有待提升。本文通过篇章内话头话体结构分析,建立标点句间远距离关联关系、补全共享缺失成分,辅助机器阅读理解答案抽取;设计和实现融合话头话体结构信息的机器阅读理解模型,在公开数据集CMRC2018上的实验结果表明,模型的F1值相对于基线模型提升2.4%,EM值提升6%。”

For the task of relation extraction, distant supervision is an efficient approach to generate labeled data by aligning knowledge base with free texts. The essence of it is a challenging incomplete multi-label classification problem with sparse and noisy features. To address the challenge, this work presents a novel nonparametric Bayesian formulation for the task. Experiment results show substantially higher top precision improvements over the traditional state-of-the-art approaches.