Inference of Fine-Grained Event Causality from Blogs and Films

Zhichao Hu, Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Marilyn Walker

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Abstract
Human understanding of narrative is mainly driven by reasoning about causal relations between events and thus recognizing them is a key capability for computational models of language understanding. Computational work in this area has approached this via two different routes: by focusing on acquiring a knowledge base of common causal relations between events, or by attempting to understand a particular story or macro-event, along with its storyline. In this position paper, we focus on knowledge acquisition approach and claim that newswire is a relatively poor source for learning fine-grained causal relations between everyday events. We describe experiments using an unsupervised method to learn causal relations between events in the narrative genres of first-person narratives and film scene descriptions. We show that our method learns fine-grained causal relations, judged by humans as likely to be causal over 80% of the time. We also demonstrate that the learned event pairs do not exist in publicly available event-pair datasets extracted from newswire.
Anthology ID:
W17-2708
Volume:
Proceedings of the Events and Stories in the News Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Tommaso Caselli, Ben Miller, Marieke van Erp, Piek Vossen, Martha Palmer, Eduard Hovy, Teruko Mitamura, David Caswell
Venue:
EventStory
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
52–58
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2708
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2708
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhichao Hu, Elahe Rahimtoroghi, and Marilyn Walker. 2017. Inference of Fine-Grained Event Causality from Blogs and Films. In Proceedings of the Events and Stories in the News Workshop, pages 52–58, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inference of Fine-Grained Event Causality from Blogs and Films (Hu et al., EventStory 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/W17-2708.pdf
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