Guided Generation of Cause and Effect

Guided Generation of Cause and Effect

Zhongyang Li, Xiao Ding, Ting Liu, J. Edward Hu, Benjamin Van Durme

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3629-3636. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/502

We present a conditional text generation framework that posits sentential expressions of possible causes and effects. This framework depends on two novel resources we develop in the course of this work: a very large-scale collection of English sentences expressing causal patterns (CausalBank); and a refinement over previous work on constructing large lexical causal knowledge graphs (Cause Effect Graph). Further, we extend prior work in lexically-constrained decoding to support disjunctive positive constraints. Human assessment confirms that our approach gives high-quality and diverse outputs. Finally, we use CausalBank to perform continued training of an encoder supporting a recent state-of-the-art model for causal reasoning, leading to a 3-point improvement on the COPA challenge set, with no change in model architecture.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Generation
Natural Language Processing: Knowledge Extraction
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change and Causality