# Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02893 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02893/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07004/) (2023)
- [Explaining Answers with Entailment Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08661/) (2021)
- [M3Exam: A Multilingual, Multimodal, Multilevel Benchmark for Examining Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05179/) (2023)
- [Spanish Pre-trained BERT Model and Evaluation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02976/) (2023)
- [CoSDA-ML: Multi-Lingual Code-Switching Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06402/) (2020)
- [Trankit: A Light-Weight Transformer-based Toolkit for Multilingual Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03289/) (2021)
- [How Far are We from Effective Context Modeling? An Exploratory Study on Semantic Parsing in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00652/) (2020)
- [Attention-Informed Mixed-Language Training for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Task-oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09273/) (2019)
- [The Life Cycle of Knowledge in Big Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07616/) (2023)
- [Improving Event Causality Identification via Self-Supervised Representation Learning on External Causal Statement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01654/) (2021)
- [ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07434/) (2022)
- [Extracting Temporal and Causal Relations between Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.08120/) (2016)
- [Semantic Structure Enhanced Event Causality Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12792/) (2023)
- [EventNarrative: A large-scale Event-centric Dataset for Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00276/) (2021)
- [GL-CLeF: A Global-Local Contrastive Learning Framework for Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08325/) (2022)
- [Searching News Articles Using an Event Knowledge Graph Leveraged by Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05557/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Document-level Causal Relation Extraction with Knowledge-guided Binary Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04752/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Event Causality Identification: Taxonomy, Challenges, Assessment, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10371/) (2024)
- [SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning: Towards Real-World Event Causal Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21720/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event Causality Identification (ECI) refers to the detection of causal relations between events in texts. However, most existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving more challenging document-level ECI (DECI) with low-resource languages under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning (GIMC) for zero-shot cross-lingual document-level ECI. Specifically, we introduce a heterogeneous graph interaction network to model the long-distance dependencies between events that are scattered over a document. Then, to improve cross-lingual transferability of causal knowledge learned from the source language, we propose a multi-granularity contrastive transfer learning module to align the causal representations across languages. Extensive experiments show our framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score on monolingual and multilingual scenarios respectively. Notably, in the multilingual scenario, our zero-shot framework even exceeds GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning by 24.3% in overall performance.