Publications

MECI: A Multilingual Dataset for Event Causality Identification

COLING 2022

Publication date: October 17, 2022

Viet Dac Lai, Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Minh Van Nguyen, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen

Event Causality Identification (ECI) is the task of detecting causal relations between events mentioned in the text. Although this task has been extensively studied for English materials, it is under-explored for many other languages. A major reason for this issue is the lack of multilingual datasets that provide consistent annotations for event causality relations in multiple non-English languages. To address this issue, we introduce a new multilingual dataset for ECI, called MECI. The dataset employs consistent annotation guidelines for five typologically different languages, i.e., English, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Our dataset thus enable a new research direction on cross-lingual transfer learning for ECI. Our extensive experiments demonstrate high quality for MECI that can pro-vide ample research challenges and directions for future research. We will publicly release MECI to promote research on multilingual ECI.