# Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09648 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09648/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11520/) (2021)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [UniVL: A Unified Video and Language Pre-Training Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06353/) (2020)
- [Long-Term Feature Banks for Detailed Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05038/) (2018)
- [Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06774/) (2022)
- [Heterogeneous Memory Enhanced Multimodal Attention Model for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04357/) (2019)
- [A Knowledge-Enhanced Pretraining Model for Commonsense Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05139/) (2020)
- [GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07758/) (2020)
- [Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA -- An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13947/) (2022)
- [Of Human Criteria and Automatic Metrics: A Benchmark of the Evaluation of Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11646/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07375/) (2023)
- [MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07342/) (2022)
- [Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and Character](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.3841/) (2014)
- [OpenMEVA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08920/) (2021)
- [UNION: An Unreferenced Metric for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07602/) (2020)
- [The Next Chapter: A Study of Large Language Models in Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09790/) (2023)
- [Better Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems with Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10635/) (2019)
- [Automated Storytelling via Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00829/) (2020)
- [Pre-training Is (Almost) All You Need: An Application to Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14074/) (2020)
- [Visual Writing Prompts: Character-Grounded Story Generation with Curated Image Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08571/) (2023)
- [CTRLEval: An Unsupervised Reference-Free Metric for Evaluating Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00862/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15851/) (2026)
- [ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08148/) (2025)
- [Q2E: Query-to-Event Decomposition for Zero-Shot Multilingual Text-to-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10202/) (2025)
- [A Multi-Level Benchmark for Causal Language Understanding in Social Media Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16722/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Synopses of Movie Narratives: A Dataset for Vision-Language Story Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13092/) (2024)
- [Causal Graph based Event Reasoning using Semantic Relation Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06910/) (2025)
- [Causal Micro-Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05252/) (2024)
- [Two Causally Related Needles in a Video Haystack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19853/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking LLMs for Pairwise Causal Discovery in Biomedical and Multi-Domain Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15479/) (2026)
- [Planning Beyond Text: Graph-based Reasoning for Complex Narrative Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21253/) (2026)
- [Narrative Knowledge Weaver: Narrative-Centric Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Long-Form Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05724/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cognitive science and symbolic AI research suggest that event causality provides vital information for story understanding. However, machine learning systems for story understanding rarely employ event causality, partially due to the lack of methods that reliably identify open-world causal event relations. Leveraging recent progress in large language models, we present the first method for event causality identification that leads to material improvements in computational story understanding. Our technique sets a new state of the art on the COPES dataset (Wang et al., 2023) for causal event relation identification. Further, in the downstream story quality evaluation task, the identified causal relations lead to 3.6-16.6% relative improvement on correlation with human ratings. In the multimodal story video-text alignment task, we attain 4.1-10.9% increase on Clip Accuracy and 4.2-13.5% increase on Sentence IoU. The findings indicate substantial untapped potential for event causality in computational story understanding. The codebase is at https://github.com/insundaycathy/Event-Causality-Extraction.