Causal Micro-Narratives
<|reference_start|>Causal Micro-Narratives: We present a novel approach to classify causal micro-narratives from text. These narratives are sentence-level explanations of the cause(s) and/or effect(s) of a target subject. The approach requires only a subject-specific ontology of causes and effects, and we demonstrate it with an application to inflation narratives. Using a human-annotated dataset spanning historical and contemporary US news articles for training, we evaluate several large language models (LLMs) on this multi-label classification task. The best-performing model--a fine-tuned Llama 3.1 8B--achieves F1 scores of 0.87 on narrative detection and 0.71 on narrative classification. Comprehensive error analysis reveals challenges arising from linguistic ambiguity and highlights how model errors often mirror human annotator disagreements. This research establishes a framework for extracting causal micro-narratives from real-world data, with wide-ranging applications to social science research.<|reference_end|>
@article{heddaya2024causal,
    title={Causal Micro-Narratives},
    author={Mourad Heddaya, Qingcheng Zeng, Chenhao Tan, Rob Voigt, Alexander
  Zentefis},
    journal={Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding at
  EMNLP 2024, pages 67-84, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational
  Linguistics},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2410.05252},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI cs.IR cs.LG}
}