journal article·2025-06-30Open access

IECI: A Pipeline Framework for Iterative Event Causal Identification with Dynamic Inference Chains

Hefei Chen, Yuanyuan Cai, Zexi Song, Yiyao Zhang, Hongbo Zhang

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 13

Abstract

Event Causality Identification (ECI) is a crucial task in Information Extraction (IE). However, information about events described in documents is often distributed across sentences, which makes it difficult for existing studies to capture long-distance causal relations between events. To address these issues, this paper proposes Iterative Event Causal Identification (IECI), a pipelined framework for event causality identification that integrates two modules. The first module introduces Prompt-Based Event Detection (PRED), which integrates semantic role awareness with prompt templates to provide foundational input for the next module. The second module proposes the Semantic-Role Guided Causal Inference Graph (SRCIG), which identifies causal relations between events by constructing a causal graph and applying a dynamic threshold adjustment mechanism during the iterative process. Our experiments show that PRED and IECI consistently outperform the state-of-the-art baseline model. Specifically, on the EventStoryLine dataset, they achieve F1 improvements of 3.7–9.8% and 4.2–18.8%, respectively, while on MAVEN-ERE the gains are 4.2–10.3% and 1.0–40.3%. This demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework in both event detection and event causality identification.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Data Quality and Management · Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference · Topic Modeling

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Research Centre for Agri-Product Quality Traceability, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing 100048, China

Funding

National Key Technology R&D Program of China · National Natural Science Foundation of China · Project of Cultivation for Young Top-notch Talents of Beijing Municipal Institutions · Project of Construction and Support for high-level Innovative Teams of Beijing Municipal Institutions · Beijing Scholars Program

References (42)

Show source-provided references
1. Moreira, F., Velez-Bedoya, J.I., and Arango-López, J. (2025). Integration of Causal Models and Deep Neural Networks for Recommendation Systems in Dynamic Environments: A Case Study in StarCraft II. Appl. Sci., 15.10.3390/app15084263 ↗
2. Lu, F., Li, Y., and Bao, Y. (2025). Deep Knowledge Tracing Integrating Temporal Causal Inference and PINN. Appl. Sci., 15.10.3390/app15031504 ↗
3. Razouk, H., Benischke, L., Gärber, D., and Kern, R. (2025). Increasing the Accessibility of Causal Domain Knowledge via Causal Information Extraction Methods: A Case Study in the Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry. Appl. Sci., 15.10.3390/app15052573 ↗
4. Document-Level Event Causality Identification via Graph Inference Mechanism10.1016/j.ins.2021.01.078 ↗
5. Chan, C., Cheng, J., Wang, W., Jiang, Y., Fang, T., Liu, X., and Song, Y. (2024). ChatGPT Evaluation on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse Relations. arXiv.
6. Rambow, O., Wanner, L., Apidianaki, M., Al-Khalifa, H., Eugenio, B.D., and Schockaert, S. (2025, January 19–24). Dr.ECI: Infusing Large Language Models with Causal Knowledge for Decomposed Reasoning in Event Causality Identification. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
7. Yan, Y., Liu, Z., Gao, F., and Gu, J. (2023). Type Hierarchy Enhanced Event Detection without Triggers. Appl. Sci., 13.10.3390/app13042296 ↗
8. Chen, J., Chen, P., and Wu, X. (2023). Generating Chinese Event Extraction Method Based on ChatGPT and Prompt Learning. Appl. Sci., 13.10.3390/app13179500 ↗
9. Carpuat, M., de Marneffe, M.-C., and Meza Ruiz, I.V. (2022, January 10–15). Zero-Shot Event Detection Based on Ordered Contrastive Learning and Prompt-Based Prediction. Proceedings of the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, Seattle, WA, USA.
10. Inui, K., Jiang, J., Ng, V., and Wan, X. (2019, January 3–7). Weakly Supervised Multilingual Causality Extraction from Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), Hong Kong, China.
11. Liu, J., Chen, Y., and Zhao, J. (2021, January 7–15). Knowledge Enhanced Event Causality Identification with Mention Masking Generalizations. Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Yokohama, Japan.10.24963/ijcai.2020/499 ↗
12. Zong, C., Xia, F., Li, W., and Navigli, R. (2021, January 2–4). Improving Event Causality Identification via Self-Supervised Representation Learning on External Causal Statement. Proceedings of the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021, Online.
13. Rogers, A., Boyd-Graber, J., and Okazaki, N. (2023, January 9–14). Semantic Structure Enhanced Event Causality Identification. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Toronto, ON, Canada.
14. KEPT: Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Tuning for Event Causality Identification10.1016/j.knosys.2022.110064 ↗
15. Wang, X., Luo, W., and Yang, X. (2025). An Event Causality Identification Framework Using Ensemble Learning. Information, 16.10.3390/info16010032 ↗
16. Burstein, J., Doran, C., and Solorio, T. (2019, January 2–7). Modeling Document-Level Causal Structures for Event Causal Relation Identification. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), Minneapolis, MN, USA.
17. Toutanova, K., Rumshisky, A., Zettlemoyer, L., Hakkani-Tur, D., Beltagy, I., Bethard, S., Cotterell, R., Chakraborty, T., and Zhou, Y. (2021, January 6–11). Graph Convolutional Networks for Event Causality Identification with Rich Document-Level Structures. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Online.
18. Calzolari, N., Huang, C.-R., Kim, H., Pustejovsky, J., Wanner, L., Choi, K.-S., Ryu, P.-M., Chen, H.-H., Donatelli, L., and Ji, H. (2022, January 12–17). ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-Level Event Causality Identification. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea.
19. Liu, Z., Hu, B., Xu, Z., and Zhang, M. (2023, January 19–25). PPAT: Progressive Graph Pairwise Attention Network for Event Causality Identification. Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Macao, China.10.24963/ijcai.2023/572 ↗
20. Rogers, A., Boyd-Graber, J., and Okazaki, N. (2023, January 9–14). CHEER: Centrality-Aware High-Order Event Reasoning Network for Document-Level Event Causality Identification. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Toronto, ON, Canada.
21. Rogers, A., Boyd-Graber, J., and Okazaki, N. (2023, January 9–14). Discriminative Reasoning with Sparse Event Representation for Document-Level Event-Event Relation Extraction. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Toronto, Canada.
22. Zeng, X., Bai, Z., Qin, K., and Luo, G. (2024). EiGC: An Event-Induced Graph with Constraints for Event Causality Identification. Electronics, 13.10.3390/electronics13234608 ↗
23. Caselli, T., van Erp, M., Minard, A.-L., Finlayson, M., Miller, B., Atserias, J., Balahur, A., and Vossen, P. (2015, January 26–31). Improving Event Detection with Abstract Meaning Representation. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines, Beijing, China.
24. Liu, S., Liu, K., He, S., and Zhao, J. (2016, January 12–17). A Probabilistic Soft Logic Based Approach to Exploiting Latent and Global Information in Event Classification. Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Phoenix, AZ, USA.10.1609/aaai.v30i1.10375 ↗
25. Knight, K., Nenkova, A., and Rambow, O. (2016, January 12–17). Joint Event Extraction via Recurrent Neural Networks. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, San Diego, CA, USA.
26. Sha, L., Qian, F., Chang, B., and Sui, Z. (2018, January 2–7). Jointly Extracting Event Triggers and Arguments by Dependency-Bridge RNN and Tensor-Based Argument Interaction. Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirtieth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference and Eighth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, New Orleans, LA, USA.10.1609/aaai.v32i1.12034 ↗
27. Riloff, E., Chiang, D., Hockenmaier, J., and Tsujii, J. (November, January 31). Event Detection with Neural Networks: A Rigorous Empirical Evaluation. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Brussels, Belgium.
28. Inui, K., Jiang, J., Ng, V., and Wan, X. (2019, January 3–7). Event Detection with Multi-Order Graph Convolution and Aggregated Attention. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), Hong Kong, China.
29. Webber, B., Cohn, T., He, Y., and Liu, Y. (2020, January 16–20). Semi-Supervised New Event Type Induction and Event Detection. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Online.
30. Moens, M.-F., Huang, X., Specia, L., and Yih, S.W. (2021, January 7–11). Honey or Poison? Solving the Trigger Curse in Few-Shot Event Detection via Causal Intervention. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.
31. Sheng, J., Sun, R., Guo, S., Cui, S., Cao, J., Wang, L., Liu, T., and Xu, H. (2022, January 11–15). CorED: Incorporating Type-Level and Instance-Level Correlations for Fine-Grained Event Detection. Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Madrid, Spain.10.1145/3477495.3531956 ↗
32. Semantic Fusion Enhanced Event Detection via Multi-Graph Attention Network with Skip Connection10.1109/TETCI.2022.3229414 ↗
33. SynED: A Syntax-Based Low-Resource Event Detection Method for New Event Types
34. DE3TC: Detecting Events with Effective Event Type Information and Context10.1007/s11063-024-11570-8 ↗
35. Causal Knowledge Extraction from Long Text Maintenance Documents10.1016/j.compind.2024.104110 ↗
36. Caselli, T., Miller, B., van Erp, M., Vossen, P., Palmer, M., Hovy, E., Mitamura, T., and Caswell, D. (2017, January 4). The Event StoryLine Corpus: A New Benchmark for Causal and Temporal Relation Extraction. Proceedings of the Events and Stories in the News Workshop, Vancouver, BC, Canada.10.18653/v1/W17-2711 ↗
37. Goldberg, Y., Kozareva, Z., and Zhang, Y. (2022, January 7–11). MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-Scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
38. Calzolari, N., Huang, C.-R., Kim, H., Pustejovsky, J., Wanner, L., Choi, K.-S., Ryu, P.-M., Chen, H.-H., Donatelli, L., and Ji, H. (2022, January 12–17). PCBERT: Parent and Child BERT for Chinese Few-Shot NER. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea.
39. Hu, S., Zhang, H., Hu, X., and Du, J. (2022, January 26–28). Chinese Named Entity Recognition Based on BERT-CRF Model. Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE/ACIS 22nd International Conference on Computer and Information Science (ICIS), Zhuhai, China.10.1109/ICIS54925.2022.9882514 ↗
40. He, W., Xu, Y., and Yu, Q. (2023, January 17–19). BERT-BiLSTM-CRF Chinese Resume Named Entity Recognition Combining Attention Mechanisms. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Engineering, Dalian, China.10.1145/3652628.3652719 ↗
41. Burstein, J., Doran, C., and Solorio, T. (2019, January 2–7). BERT: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), Minneapolis, MN, USA.
42. Calzolari, N., Kan, M.-Y., Hoste, V., Lenci, A., Sakti, S., and Xue, N. (2024, January 20–25). Hierarchical Selection of Important Context for Generative Event Causality Identification with Optimal Transports. Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), Torino, Italy.