Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus -- Shared Task 3, CASE 2022

The Event Causality Identification Shared Task of CASE 2022 involved two subtasks working on the Causal News Corpus. Subtask 1 required participants to predict if a sentence contains a causal relation or not. This is a supervised binary classification task. Subtask 2 required participants to identify the Cause, Effect and Signal spans per causal sentence. This could be seen as a supervised sequence labeling task. For both subtasks, participants uploaded their predictions for a held-out test set, and ranking was done based on binary F1 and macro F1 scores for Subtask 1 and 2, respectively. This paper summarizes the work of the 17 teams that submitted their results to our competition and 12 system description papers that were received. The best F1 scores achieved for Subtask 1 and 2 were 86.19% and 54.15%, respectively. All the top-performing approaches involved pre-trained language models fine-tuned to the targeted task. We further discuss these approaches and analyze errors across participants' systems in this paper.Comment: Accepted to the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2022

Extracting Temporal and Causal Relations between Events

Structured information resulting from temporal information processing is crucial for a variety of natural language processing tasks, for instance to generate timeline summarization of events from news documents, or to answer temporal/causal-related questions about some events. In this thesis we present a framework for an integrated temporal and causal relation extraction system. We first develop a robust extraction component for each type of relations, i.e. temporal order and causality. We then combine the two extraction components into an integrated relation extraction system, CATENA---CAusal and Temporal relation Extraction from NAtural language texts---, by utilizing the presumption about event precedence in causality, that causing events must happened BEFORE resulting events. Several resources and techniques to improve our relation extraction systems are also discussed, including word embeddings and training data expansion. Finally, we report our adaptation efforts of temporal information processing for languages other than English, namely Italian and Indonesian.Comment: PhD Thesi