Recognizing Causality in Verb-Noun Pairs via Noun and Verb Semantics

Several supervised approaches have been proposed for causality identification by relying on shallow linguistic features. However, such features do not lead to improved performance. Therefore, novel sources of knowledge are required to achieve progress on this problem. In this paper, we propose a model for the recognition of causality in verb-noun pairs by employing additional types of knowledge along with linguistic features. In particular, we focus on identifying and employing semantic classes of nouns and verbs with high tendency to encode cause or non-cause relations. Our model incorporates the information about these classes to minimize errors in predictions made by a basic supervised classifier relying merely on shallow linguistic features. As compared with this basic classifier our model achieves 14.74% (29.57%) improvement in F-score (accuracy), respectively.