An Empirical Study of Causal Relation Extraction Transfer: Design and Data

We conduct an empirical analysis of neural network architectures and data transfer strategies for causal relation extraction. By conducting experiments with various contextual embedding layers and architectural components, we show that a relatively straightforward BioBERT-BiGRU relation extraction model generalizes better than other architectures across varying web-based sources and annotation strategies. Furthermore, we introduce a metric for evaluating transfer performance, $F1_{phrase}$ that emphasizes noun phrase localization rather than directly matching target tags. Using this metric, we can conduct data transfer experiments, ultimately revealing that augmentation with data with varying domains and annotation styles can improve performance. Data augmentation is especially beneficial when an adequate proportion of implicitly and explicitly causal sentences are included.