Making sense of familiar yet new situations typically involves making generalizations about causal schemas, stories that help humans reason about event sequences. Reasoning about events includes identifying cause and effect relations shared across event instances, a process we refer to as causal schema induction. Statistical schema induction systems may leverage structural knowledge encoded in discourse or the causal graphs associated with event meaning, however resources to study such causal structure are few in number and limited in size. In this work, we investigate how to apply schema induction models to the task of knowledge discovery for enhanced search of English-language news texts. To tackle the problem of data scarcity, we present Torquestra, a manually curated dataset of text-graph-schema units integrating temporal, event, and causal structures. We benchmark our dataset on three knowledge discovery tasks, building and evaluating models for each. Results show that systems that harness causal structure are effective at identifying texts sharing similar causal meaning components rather than relying on lexical cues alone. We make our dataset and models available for research purposes.
Causal inference for testing clinical hypotheses from observational data presents many difficulties because the underlying data-generating model and the associated causal graph are not usually available. Furthermore, observational data may contain missing values, which impact the recovery of the causal graph by causal discovery algorithms: a crucial issue often ignored in clinical studies. In this work, we use data from a multi-centric study on endometrial cancer to analyze the impact of different missingness mechanisms on the recovered causal graph. This is achieved by extending state-of-the-art causal discovery algorithms to exploit expert knowledge without sacrificing theoretical soundness. We validate the recovered graph with expert physicians, showing that our approach finds clinically-relevant solutions. Finally, we discuss the goodness of fit of our graph and its consistency from a clinical decision-making perspective using graphical separation to validate causal pathways.
Many jobs rely on news to learn about causal events in the past and present, to make informed decisions and predictions about the future. With the ever-increasing amount of news and text available on the internet, there is a need to automate the extraction of causal events from unstructured texts. In this work, we propose a methodology to construct causal knowledge graphs (KGs) from news using two steps: (1) Extraction of Causal Relations, and (2) Argument Clustering and Representation into KG. We aim to build graphs that emphasize on recall, precision and interpretability. For extraction, although many earlier works already construct causal KGs from text, most adopt rudimentary pattern-based methods. We close this gap by using the latest BERT-based extraction models alongside pattern-based ones. As a result, we achieved a high recall, while still maintaining a high precision. For clustering, we utilized a topic modelling approach to cluster our arguments, so as to increase the connectivity of our graph. As a result, instead of 15,686 disconnected subgraphs, we were able to obtain 1 connected graph that enables users to infer more causal relationships from. Our final KG effectively captures and conveys causal relationships, validated through multiple use cases and user feedback.
Question answering over knowledge graphs and other RDF data has been greatly advanced, with a number of good systems providing crisp answers for natural language questions or telegraphic queries. Some of these systems incorporate textual sources as additional evidence for the answering process, but cannot compute answers that are present in text alone. Conversely, systems from the IR and NLP communities have addressed QA over text, but such systems barely utilize semantic data and knowledge. This paper presents a method for complex questions that can seamlessly operate over a mixture of RDF datasets and text corpora, or individual sources, in a unified framework. Our method, called UNIQORN, builds a context graph on-the-fly, by retrieving question-relevant evidences from the RDF data and/or a text corpus, using fine-tuned BERT models. The resulting graph is typically contains all question-relevant evidences but also a lot of noise. UNIQORN copes with this input by a graph algorithm for Group Steiner Trees, that identifies the best answer candidates in the context graph. Experimental results on several benchmarks of complex questions with multiple entities and relations, show that UNIQORN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for heterogeneous QA. The graph-based methodology provides user-interpretable evidence for the complete answering process.
Causal inference is fundamental to empirical scientific discoveries in natural and social sciences; however, in the process of conducting causal inference, data management problems can lead to false discoveries. Two such problems are (i) not having all attributes required for analysis, and (ii) misidentifying which attributes are to be included in the analysis. Analysts often only have access to partial data, and they critically rely on (often unavailable or incomplete) domain knowledge to identify attributes to include for analysis, which is often given in the form of a causal DAG. We argue that data management techniques can surmount both of these challenges. In this work, we introduce the Causal Data Integration (CDI) problem, in which unobserved attributes are mined from external sources and a corresponding causal DAG is automatically built. We identify key challenges and research opportunities in designing a CDI system, and present a system architecture for solving the CDI problem. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate that solving CDI is achievable and pave the way for future research.
With the advent of pretrained language models (LMs), increasing research efforts have been focusing on infusing commonsense and domain-specific knowledge to prepare LMs for downstream tasks. These works attempt to leverage knowledge graphs, the de facto standard of symbolic knowledge representation, along with pretrained LMs. While existing approaches have leveraged external knowledge, it remains an open question how to jointly incorporate knowledge graphs representing varying contexts, from local (e.g., sentence), to document-level, to global knowledge, to enable knowledge-rich exchange across these contexts. Such rich contextualization can be especially beneficial for long document understanding tasks since standard pretrained LMs are typically bounded by the input sequence length. In light of these challenges, we propose KALM, a Knowledge-Aware Language Model that jointly leverages knowledge in local, document-level, and global contexts for long document understanding. KALM first encodes long documents and knowledge graphs into the three knowledge-aware context representations. It then processes each context with context-specific layers, followed by a context fusion layer that facilitates knowledge exchange to derive an overarching document representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KALM achieves state-of-the-art performance on six long document understanding tasks and datasets. Further analyses reveal that the three knowledge-aware contexts are complementary and they all contribute to model performance, while the importance and information exchange patterns of different contexts vary with respect to different tasks and datasets.
Even when the causal graph underlying our data is unknown, we can use observational data to narrow down the possible values that an average treatment effect (ATE) can take by (1) identifying the graph up to a Markov equivalence class; and (2) estimating that ATE for each graph in the class. While the PC algorithm can identify this class under strong faithfulness assumptions, it can be computationally prohibitive. Fortunately, only the local graph structure around the treatment is required to identify the set of possible ATE values, a fact exploited by local discovery algorithms to improve computational efficiency. In this paper, we introduce Local Discovery using Eager Collider Checks (LDECC), a new local causal discovery algorithm that leverages unshielded colliders to orient the treatment's parents differently from existing methods. We show that there exist graphs where LDECC exponentially outperforms existing local discovery algorithms and vice versa. Moreover, we show that LDECC and existing algorithms rely on different faithfulness assumptions, leveraging this insight to weaken the assumptions for identifying the set of possible ATE values.
Understanding causality helps to structure interventions to achieve specific goals and enables predictions under interventions. With the growing importance of learning causal relationships, causal discovery tasks have transitioned from using traditional methods to infer potential causal structures from observational data to the field of pattern recognition involved in deep learning. The rapid accumulation of massive data promotes the emergence of causal search methods with brilliant scalability. Existing summaries of causal discovery methods mainly focus on traditional methods based on constraints, scores and FCMs, there is a lack of perfect sorting and elaboration for deep learning-based methods, also lacking some considers and exploration of causal discovery methods from the perspective of variable paradigms. Therefore, we divide the possible causal discovery tasks into three types according to the variable paradigm and give the definitions of the three tasks respectively, define and instantiate the relevant datasets for each task and the final causal model constructed at the same time, then reviews the main existing causal discovery methods for different tasks. Finally, we propose some roadmaps from different perspectives for the current research gaps in the field of causal discovery and point out future research directions.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as useful resources for various natural language processing applications. Previous KG completion approaches require a large number of training instances (i.e., head-tail entity pairs) for every relation. The real case is that for most of the relations, very few entity pairs are available. Existing work of one-shot learning limits method generalizability for few-shot scenarios and does not fully use the supervisory information; however, few-shot KG completion has not been well studied yet. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot relation learning model (FSRL) that aims at discovering facts of new relations with few-shot references. FSRL can effectively capture knowledge from heterogeneous graph structure, aggregate representations of few-shot references, and match similar entity pairs of reference set for every relation. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that FSRL outperforms the state-of-the-art.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.