Causal Pathway Extraction from Web-Board Documents

This research aim is to extract causal pathways, particularly disease causal pathways, through cause-effect relation (CErel) extraction from web-board documents. The causal pathways benefit people with a comprehensible representation approach to disease complication. A causative/effect-concept expre...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chaveevan Pechsiri, Rapepun Piriyakul
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-11-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/21/10342
Description
Summary:This research aim is to extract causal pathways, particularly disease causal pathways, through cause-effect relation (CErel) extraction from web-board documents. The causal pathways benefit people with a comprehensible representation approach to disease complication. A causative/effect-concept expression is based on a verb phrase of an elementary discourse unit (EDU) or a simple sentence. The research has three main problems; how to determine CErel on an EDU-concept pair containing both causative and effect concepts in one EDU, how to extract causal pathways from EDU-concept pairs having CErel and how to indicate and represent implicit effect/causative-concept EDUs as implicit mediators with comprehension on extracted causal pathways. Therefore, we apply EDU’s word co-occurrence concept (wrdCoc) as an EDU-concept and the self-Cartesian product of a wrdCoc set from the documents for extracting wrdCoc pairs having CErel into a wrdCoc-pair set from the documents after learning CErel on wrdCoc pairs by supervised-machine learning. The wrdCoc-pair set is used for extracting the causal pathways by wrdCoc-pair matching through the documents. We then propose transitive closure and a dynamic template to indicate and represent the implicit mediators with the explicit ones. In contrast to previous works, the proposed approach enables causal-pathway extraction with high accuracy from the documents.
ISSN:2076-3417