Weakly Supervised Multilingual Causality Extraction from Wikipedia

Chikara Hashimoto

Abstract:

We present a method for extracting causality
knowledge from Wikipedia, such as Protectionism → Trade war, where the cause and
effect entities correspond to Wikipedia articles. Such causality knowledge is easy to verify by reading corresponding Wikipedia articles, to translate to multiple languages through
Wikidata, and to connect to knowledge bases
derived from Wikipedia. Our method exploits Wikipedia article sections that describe
causality and the redundancy stemming from
the multilinguality of Wikipedia. Experiments
showed that our method achieved precision
and recall above 98% and 64%, respectively.
In particular, it could extract causalities whose
cause and effect were written distantly in a
Wikipedia article. We have released the code
and data for further research.