Boosting Causal Embeddings via Potential Verb-Mediated Causal Patterns

Boosting Causal Embeddings via Potential Verb-Mediated Causal Patterns

Zhipeng Xie, Feiteng Mu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 1921-1927. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/266

Existing approaches to causal embeddings rely heavily on hand-crafted high-precision causal patterns, leading to limited coverage. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method to boost causal embeddings by exploring potential verb-mediated causal patterns. It first constructs a seed set of causal word pairs, then uses them as supervision to characterize the causal strengths of extracted verb-mediated patterns, and finally exploits the weighted extractions by those verb-mediated patterns in the construction of boosted causal embeddings. Experimental results have shown that the boosted causal embeddings outperform several state-of-the-arts significantly on both English and Chinese. As by-products, the top-ranked patterns coincide with human intuition about causality.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change and Causality