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Experience-based Causality Learning for Intelligent Agents

Published: 21 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding causality in text is crucial for intelligent agents. In this article, inspired by human causality learning, we propose an experience-based causality learning framework. Comparing to traditional approaches, which attempt to handle the causality problem relying on textual clues and linguistic resources, we are the first to use experience information for causality learning. Specifically, we first construct various scenarios for intelligent agents, thus, the agents can gain experience from interaction in these scenarios. Then, human participants build a number of training instances for agents of causality learning based on these scenarios. Each instance contains two sentences and a label. Each sentence describes an event that an agent experienced in a scenario, and the label indicates whether the sentence (event) pair has a causal relation. Accordingly, we propose a model that can infer the causality in text using experience by accessing the corresponding event information based on the input sentence pair. Experiment results show that our method can achieve impressive performance on the grounded causality corpus and significantly outperform the conventional approaches. Our work suggests that experience is very important for intelligent agents to understand causality.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing
    ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing  Volume 18, Issue 4
    December 2019
    305 pages
    ISSN:2375-4699
    EISSN:2375-4702
    DOI:10.1145/3327969
    Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Publication History

    Published: 21 May 2019
    Accepted: 01 February 2019
    Revised: 01 November 2018
    Received: 01 July 2018
    Published in TALLIP Volume 18, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Intelligent agent
    2. causality learning
    3. experience
    4. grounded language learning
    5. virtual environment

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