Answering Binary Causal Questions Using Role-Oriented Concept Embedding

Answering binary causal questions is a challenging task, and it requires rich background knowledge to answer such questions. Extracting useful causal features from the background knowledge base and applying them effectively in a model is a crucial step to answering binary causal questions. The state-of-the-art approaches apply deep learning techniques to answer binary causal questions. In these approaches, candidate concepts are often embedded into vectors to model causal relationships among them. However, a concept may play the role of a cause in one question, but it could be an effect in another question. This aspect has not been extensively explored in existing approaches. Role-oriented causal concept embeddings are proposed in this article to model causality between concepts. We also propose leveraging semantic concept similarity to extract causal information from concepts. Finally, we develop a deep learning framework to answer binary causal questions. Our approach yields accuracy that is comparable to or better than the benchmark approaches. © 2020 IEEE.