Enhancing Event Causality Identification with LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations

Ya Su, Hu Zhang, Guangjun Zhang, Yujie Wang, Yue Fan, Ru Li, Yuanlong Wang

Abstract: Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims to identify fine-grained causal relationships between events in an unstructured text. Existing ECI methods primarily rely on knowledge enhanced and graph-based reasoning approaches, but they often overlook the dependencies between similar events. Additionally, the connection between unstructured text and structured knowledge is relatively weak. Therefore, this paper proposes an ECI method enhanced by LLM Knowledge and Concept-Level Event Relations (LKCER). Specifically, LKCER constructs a conceptual-level heterogeneous event graph by leveraging the local contextual information of related event mentions, generating a more comprehensive global semantic representation of event concepts. At the same time, the knowledge generated by COMET is filtered and enriched using LLM, strengthening the associations between event pairs and knowledge. Finally, the joint event conceptual representation and knowledge-enhanced event representation are used to uncover potential causal relationships between events. The experimental results show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both benchmarks, EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank.