Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as dominant foundational models in modern NLP. However, the understanding of their prediction processes and internal mechanisms, such as feed-forward networks (FFN) and multi-head self-attention (MHSA), remains largely unexplored. In this work, we probe LLMs from a human behavioral perspective, correlating values from LLMs with eye-tracking measures, which are widely recognized as meaningful indicators of human reading patterns. Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit a similar prediction pattern with humans but distinct from that of Shallow Language Models (SLMs). Moreover, with the escalation of LLM layers from the middle layers, the correlation coefficients also increase in FFN and MHSA, indicating that the logits within FFN increasingly encapsulate word semantics suitable for predicting tokens from the vocabulary.

Event Causality Extraction (ECE) aims to extract the cause-effect event pairs from the given text, which requires the model to possess a strong reasoning ability to capture event causalities. However, existing works have not adequately exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning. To this end, we propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction (ICE) framework, which formulates ECE as a template-based conditional generation problem. The proposed method captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning, and a knowledge distillation mechanism is introduced to alleviate the unavailability of privileged information in the test stage. Furthermore, to facilitate knowledge transfer from teacher to student, we design an event-level alignment strategy named Cause-Effect Optimal Transport (CEOT) to strengthen the semantic interactions of cause-effect event types and arguments. Experimental results indicate that ICE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ECE-CCKS dataset.

To create a captivating story, a writer often plans a sequence of logically coherent events and ingeniously manipulates the narrative order to generate flashback in place. However, existing storytelling systems suffer from both insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order (e.g., go to hospital <after> get ill), making it challenging to generate high-quality events that balance the logic and narrative order of story. In this paper, we propose a narrative order aware framework BPOT (Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward) for story generation, which presents a bidirectional pretrained model to encode event correlations and pairwise event order. We also design a reinforcement learning algorithm with novel optimal transport reward to further improve the quality of generated events in the fine-tuning stage. Specifically, a narrative order aware event sequence model is pretrained with the joint learning objectives of event blank infilling and pairwise order prediction. Then, reinforcement learning with novel optimal transport reward is designed to further improve the generated event quality in the fine-tuning stage. The novel optimal transport reward captures the mappings between the generated events and the sentences in the story, effectively measuring the quality of generated events. Both automatic and manual evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of our framework in generating logically coherent stories with flashbacks.