# Enhancing Event Causality Identification with Rationale and Structure-Aware Causal Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11129 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11129/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02301/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are Not Robust Multiple Choice Selectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03882/) (2023)
- [Aging with GRACE: Lifelong Model Editing with Discrete Key-Value Adaptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11031/) (2022)
- [Measuring Association Between Labels and Free-Text Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12762/) (2020)
- [WT5?! Training Text-to-Text Models to Explain their Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14546/) (2020)
- [PINTO: Faithful Language Reasoning Using Prompt-Generated Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01562/) (2022)
- [Lion: Adversarial Distillation of Proprietary Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12870/) (2023)
- [Causality Extraction based on Self-Attentive BiLSTM-CRF with Transferred Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07629/) (2019)
- [COLA: Contextualized Commonsense Causal Reasoning from the Causal Inference Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05191/) (2023)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Survey on Enhancing Causal Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09326/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Event Causality Identification: Taxonomy, Challenges, Assessment, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10371/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify causal relations between two events in documents. Recent research tends to use pre-trained language models to generate the event causal relations. Whereas, these methods are prone to the errors of sequential generation due to multiple events in a document. Moreover, the potential structures such as event coreference and related causal chain are neglected. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning framework to enhance event causality identification with rationale and structure-aware causal question answering. Specifically, the DECI task is transformed into multiple-choice question answering, and the causes and effects of the questioned event are generated with large language models. In addition, we generate the rationales to explain why these events have causal relations. Moreover, we construct an event structure graph, which models the multi-hop potential relations for causal reasoning of the current event. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show the great advantages of our proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses, which shed light on why each component of our approach can lead to great improvements.