Separate and Integrate Different Level Reasoning for Event Causality Identification

Document-level event causality identification (DECI) aims to discern the causal relationship between two event mentions within a document, which is a more challenging task compared to sentence-level event causality identification. However, the conventional DECI model applies the same method to all pairs of events without considering the distinctions and connections between intra-sentence and inter-sentence event pairs. This paper introduces a novel Separate and Integrate Different Level reasoning model (SIDL) to extract and fuse text features of events. Specifically, we separately encode intra-sentence and inter-sentence event pairs and leverage attention from pre-trained language models to identify the relevant context for aiding in the determination of causality. Additionally, we propose a causal reasoning strategy that leverages intra-sentence causal relationships to assist in the inference of inter-sentence causal relationships. We combine different features of event pairs by discriminating the characters and effects of intra-sentence and inter-sentence reasoning. Experimental results show that our approach achieves superior performance compared to previous models in two benchmarks EventStoryLine and CausalTimeBank.