Detecting Causally Embedded Structures Using an Evolutionary Algorithm

Chen Li, C. Roxana Girju

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Causality is an important relation among events and entities. Embedded causal structures represent an important class, expressing complex causal chains; but they are traditionally difficult to uncover automatically. In this paper we propose a method for the efficient identification and extraction of embedded causal relations with minimal supervision, by combining a representation of structured language data with modified prototype theory specifically suited to the data type. We then utilize a form of genetic algorithm specifically adapted for our purpose to locate the likely candidate linguistic structures that contain causal chains. With this procedure, we were able to identify many embedded structures with complex causal chains in two corpora of different genres, applying this algorithm as a ranking procedure for all structures in the data. We obtained 79.5% percision for top quantiles of both of our datasets (BNC & novels).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL HLT 2015 - 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation, EVENTS 2015
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages43-52
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781941643372
StatePublished - 2015
Event3rd Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation, EVENTS 2015 at the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2015 - Denver, United States
Duration: Jun 4 2015 → …

Publication series

NameNAACL HLT 2015 - 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation, EVENTS 2015

Conference

Conference3rd Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation, EVENTS 2015 at the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period6/4/15 → …

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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