ARGUABLY @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Contextually Augmented Language Models for Event Causality Identification

Causal (a cause-effect relationship between two arguments) has become integral to various NLP domains such as question answering, summarization, and event prediction. To understand causality in detail, Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus (CASE-2022) has organized shared tasks. This paper defines our participation in Subtask 1, which focuses on classifying event causality. We used sentence-level augmentation based on contextualized word embeddings of distillBERT to construct new data. This data was then trained using two approaches. The first technique used the DeBERTa language model, and the second used the RoBERTa language model in combination with cross-attention. We obtained the second-best F1 score (0.8610) in the competition with the Contextually Augmented DeBERTa model.