Causal graph extraction from news: a comparative study of time-series causality learning techniques
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Causal graph extraction from news has the potential to aid in the understanding of complex scenarios. In particular, it can help explain and predict events, as well as conjecture about possible cause-effect connections. However, limited work has addressed the problem of large-scale extraction of causal graphs from news articles. This article presents a novel framework for extracting causal graphs from digital text media. The framework relies on topic-relevant variables representing terms and ongoing events that are selected from a domain under analysis by applying specially developed information retrieval and natural language processing methods. Events are represented as event-phrase embeddings, which make it possible to group similar events into semantically cohesive clusters. A time series of the selected variables is given as input to a causal structure learning techniques to learn a causal graph associated with the topic that is being examined. The complete framework is applied to the New York Times dataset, which covers news for a period of 246 months (roughly 20 years), and is illustrated through a case study. An initial evaluation based on synthetic data is carried out to gain insight into the most effective time-series causality learning techniques. This evaluation comprises a systematic analysis of nine state-of-the-art causal structure learning techniques and two novel ensemble methods derived from the most effective techniques. Subsequently, the complete framework based on the most promising causal structure learning technique is evaluated with domain experts in a real-world scenario through the use of the presented case study. The proposed analysis offers valuable insights into the problems of identifying topic-relevant variables from large volumes of news and learning causal graphs from time series.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it