Volume 39, Issue 5 e12952
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Multi-scale event causality extraction via simultaneous knowledge-attention and convolutional neural network

Xiaoxiao Yu

Xiaoxiao Yu

School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

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Xinzhi Wang

Corresponding Author

Xinzhi Wang

School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

Correspondence

Xinzhi Wang and Xiangfeng Luo, School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China.

Email: [email protected] and [email protected]

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Xiangfeng Luo

Corresponding Author

Xiangfeng Luo

School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

Correspondence

Xinzhi Wang and Xiangfeng Luo, School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China.

Email: [email protected] and [email protected]

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Jianqi Gao

Jianqi Gao

School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

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First published: 04 March 2022

Funding information: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number: 91746203; Shanghai Sailing Program, Grant/Award Number: 20YF1413800

Abstract

Event causality extraction is a challenging task in natural language processing (NLP), which plays an important role in event prediction, scene generation, question answering and textual entailment. Most existing methods focus on extracting single-scale (such as phrase) event causality, while fails to extract multi-scale (such as word, phrase, sentence) event causality. To fill the gap, we propose multi-scale event causality extraction via simultaneous knowledge-attention and convolutional neural network (KA-CNN). First, knowledge-attention takes N-gram embedding as input and takes semantic features, fused with prior knowledge through causal associative link network (CALN), as output. Second, multi-scale CNN is designed with word embedding as input and semantic feature of corpus as output. Third, bidirectional long short-term memory with conditional random field (BiLSTM + CRF) is conducted after concatenation of features from knowledge-attention and multi-scale CNN. Finally, we compare our results with other baselines. The experimental results show that our proposed method shows promising result in extracting multi-scale event causality.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.