# Identifying while Learning for Document Event Causality Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [DAGs with NO TEARS: Continuous Optimization for Structure Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01422/) (2018)
- [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)
- [How Far are We from Effective Context Modeling? An Exploratory Study on Semantic Parsing in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00652/) (2020)
- [UHop: An Unrestricted-Hop Relation Extraction Framework for Knowledge-Based Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01246/) (2019)
- [Improving Event Causality Identification via Self-Supervised Representation Learning on External Causal Statement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01654/) (2021)
- [KnowDis: Knowledge Enhanced Data Augmentation for Event Causality Detection via Distant Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10833/) (2020)
- [ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07434/) (2022)
- [Semantic Structure Enhanced Event Causality Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12792/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02982/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [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)
- [Zero-Shot Event Causality Identification via Multi-source Evidence Fuzzy Aggregation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05675/) (2025)
- [CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs in Disaster Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02601/) (2026)
- [SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning: Towards Real-World Event Causal Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21720/) (2026)
- [Implicit Causal Graph Construction in Text via Chain Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to detect whether there exists a causal relation between two events in a document. Existing studies adopt a kind of identifying after learning paradigm, where events' representations are first learned and then used for the identification. Furthermore, they mainly focus on the causality existence, but ignoring causal direction. In this paper, we take care of the causal direction and propose a new identifying while learning mode for the ECI task. We argue that a few causal relations can be easily identified with high confidence, and the directionality and structure of these identified causalities can be utilized to update events' representations for boosting next round of causality identification. To this end, this paper designs an *iterative learning and identifying framework*: In each iteration, we construct an event causality graph, on which events' causal structure representations are updated for boosting causal identification. Experiments on two public datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in both evaluations for causality existence identification and direction identification.