mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

COLA: Contextualized Commonsense Causal Reasoning from the Causal Inference Perspective

arXiv 2305.05191 ↗First posted 9 May 2023cs.CL cs.AIcited by 22

On the map: LLM reasoning → Causal reasoning in LLMs

Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting commonsense causal relations (causation) between events has long been an essential yet challenging task. Given that events are complicated, an event may have different causes under various contexts. Thus, exploiting context plays an essential role in detecting causal relations. Meanwhile, previous works about commonsense causation only consider two events and ignore their context, simplifying the task formulation. This paper proposes a new task to detect commonsense causation between two events in an event sequence (i.e., context), called contextualized commonsense causal reasoning. We also design a zero-shot framework: COLA (Contextualized Commonsense Causality Reasoner) to solve the task from the causal inference perspective. This framework obtains rich incidental supervision from temporality and balances covariates from multiple timestamps to remove confounding effects. Our extensive experiments show that COLA can detect commonsense causality more accurately than baselines.

Key facts. Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Causal reasoning in LLMs, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 45 of its 84 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 May 2023.

Builds on

45 of 84 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022ROCK: Causal Inference Principles for Reasoning about Commonsense Causality31 Jan

Other references · 44

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  4. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,372
  5. 2020The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modelingcited by 2,411
  6. 2020DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attentioncited by 2,181
  7. 2020Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckListcited by 1,006
  8. 2018Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Modelscited by 491
  9. 2016A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Storiescited by 417
  10. 2018AllenNLP: A Deep Semantic Natural Language Processing Platformcited by 347
  11. 2019Abductive Commonsense Reasoningcited by 301
  12. 2021Polyjuice: Generating Counterfactuals for Explaining, Evaluating, and Improving Modelscited by 222
32 more
  1. 2021Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyondcited by 178
  2. 2020Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering with Self-Talkcited by 161
  3. 2019ASER: A Large-scale Eventuality Knowledge Graphcited by 89
  4. 2019Counterfactual Story Reasoning and Generationcited by 88
  5. 2020GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanationscited by 86
  6. 2018Event2Mind: Commonsense Inference on Events, Intents, and Reactionscited by 82
  7. 2018A Multi-Axis Annotation Scheme for Event Temporal Relationscited by 75
  8. 2017Zero-Shot Transfer Learning for Event Extractioncited by 66
  9. 2019Joint Reasoning for Temporal and Causal Relationscited by 62
  10. 2020Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimatescited by 59
  11. 2020Temporal Reasoning on Implicit Events from Distant Supervisioncited by 58
  12. 2020Joint Constrained Learning for Event-Event Relation Extractioncited by 53
  13. 2020Pretraining with Contrastive Sentence Objectives Improves Discourse Performance of Language Modelscited by 50
  14. 2019When Choosing Plausible Alternatives, Clever Hans can be Clevercited by 40
  15. 2020Pre-training Is (Almost) All You Need: An Application to Commonsense Reasoningcited by 33
  16. 2021Automatic Story Generation: Challenges and Attemptscited by 28
  17. 2021ASER: Towards Large-scale Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition via Higher-order Selectional Preference over Eventualitiescited by 28
  18. 2020Analogous Process Structure Induction for Sub-event Sequence Predictioncited by 26
  19. 2022Open-world Story Generation with Structured Knowledge Enhancement: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 22
  20. 2021CIDER: Commonsense Inference for Dialogue Explanation and Reasoningcited by 20
  21. 2020Extensively Matching for Few-shot Learning Event Detectioncited by 18
  22. 2020"What Are You Trying to Do?" Semantic Typing of Event Processescited by 16
  23. 2022Towards assessing agricultural land suitability with causal machine learningcited by 11
  24. 2022Efficient Zero-shot Event Extraction with Context-Definition Alignmentcited by 11
  25. 2022Distilling Causal Effect from Miscellaneous Other-Class for Continual Named Entity Recognitioncited by 10
  26. 2022SubeventWriter: Iterative Sub-event Sequence Generation with Coherence Controllercited by 10
  27. 2021Improving Commonsense Causal Reasoning by Adversarial Training and Data Augmentationcited by 9
  28. 2023Global Constraints with Prompting for Zero-Shot Event Argument Classificationcited by 8
  29. 2021Doing Good or Doing Right? Exploring the Weakness of Commonsense Causal Reasoning Modelscited by 5
  30. 2022Probing Script Knowledge from Pre-Trained Modelscited by 4
  31. 2017Detecting and Explaining Causes From Text For a Time Series Eventcited by 3
  32. 2022Some Reflections on Drawing Causal Inference using Textual Data: Parallels Between Human Subjects and Organized Textscited by 2

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2023: 7; 2024: 12; 2025: 3.

22 papers.

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  1. 2023Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluationcited by 69
  2. 2024SciMMIR: Benchmarking Scientific Multi-modal Information Retrievalcited by 23
  3. 2024CLLMate: A Multimodal Benchmark for Weather and Climate Events Forecastingcited by 20
  4. 2024AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimationcited by 14
  5. 2023Getting Sick After Seeing a Doctor? Diagnosing and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Event Temporal Reasoningcited by 13
  6. 2024CausalEval: Towards Better Causal Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 13
  7. 2024Failure Modes of LLMs for Causal Reasoning on Narrativescited by 12
  8. 2023Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understandingcited by 11
  9. 2024ComparisonQA: Evaluating Factuality Robustness of LLMs Through Knowledge Frequency Control and Uncertaintycited by 10
  10. 2025CausalAbstain: Enhancing Multilingual LLMs with Causal Reasoning for Trustworthy Abstentioncited by 10
  11. 2023LLM4Causal: Democratized Causal Tools for Everyone via Large Language Modelcited by 9
  12. 2024CodeGraph: Enhancing Graph Reasoning of LLMs with Codecited by 6
10 more
  1. 2024A Survey of Event Causality Identification: Taxonomy, Challenges, Assessment, and Prospectscited by 6
  2. 2024The Odyssey of Commonsense Causality: From Foundational Benchmarks to Cutting-Edge Reasoningcited by 5
  3. 2023QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answeringcited by 4
  4. 2023TILFA: A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument Miningcited by 3
  5. 2023Choice-75: A Dataset on Decision Branching in Script Learningcited by 2
  6. 2024Enhancing Event Causality Identification with Rationale and Structure-Aware Causal Question Answeringcited by 2
  7. 2024KNOWCOMP POKEMON Team at DialAM-2024: A Two-Stage Pipeline for Detecting Relations in Dialogical Argument Miningcited by 2
  8. 2025Event Causality Identification with Synthetic Controlcited by 2
  9. 2024Rule or Story, Which is a Better Commonsense Expression for Talking with Large Language Models?cited by 1
  10. 2025Causal Retrieval with Semantic Considerationcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoning
  2. 2025Causal Reasoning in Pieces: Modular In-Context Learning for Causal Discovery
  3. 2025Com2: A Causal-Guided Benchmark for Exploring Complex Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models
  4. 2023CRAB: Assessing the Strength of Causal Relationships Between Real-world Events
  5. 2024A Critical Review of Causal Reasoning Benchmarks for Large Language Models
  6. 2024Context-Aware Reasoning On Parametric Knowledge for Inferring Causal Variables
  7. 2023Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causality
  8. 2023CLadder: Assessing Causal Reasoning in Language Models