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Researchers in natural language processing are paying more attention to causality mining. Numerous applications of the growing need for efficient and accurate causality mining include question answering, future events predication, discourse comprehension, decision making, scenario generation, medical text mining, and textual entailment. Although causality has long been in the spotlight, but there are still issues that need to be addressed. This study provides a comprehensive review of casualty mining for various application domains available in the new-age literature from 1989 to 2022. We searched and rigorously examined numerous papers in the most reliable libraries for the review, and the terminologies that drive the context are described. Each paper underwent a thorough review process to extract the following meta-data: techniques, target domains, datasets, features, and limits of each approach. This meta-data will aid researchers in selecting the strategy that is most suited to their research needs. The literature is divided into three groups based on critical reviews including traditional, machine learning-based, and deep learning-based approaches. A concise taxonomy that can substantially help new scholars comprehend the field is developed. In order to make it simple for new researchers to start their research, various perspectives and suggestions are offered.

In the digital age, many sources of textual content are devoted to studying and expressing many sorts of relationships, including employer–employee, if–then, part–whole, product–producer, and cause–effect relations/causality. Mining cause–effect relations are a key topic in many NLP (natural language processing) applications, such as future event prediction, information retrieval, healthcare, scenario generation, decision making, commerce risk management, question answering, and adverse drug reaction. Many statistical and non-statistical methods have been developed in the past to address this topic. Most of them frequently used feature-driven supervised approaches and hand-crafted linguistic patterns. However, the implicit and ambiguous statement of causation prevented these methods from achieving great recall and precision. They cover a limited set of implicit causality and are difficult to extend. In this work, a novel MCKN (multi-column knowledge-oriented network) is introduced. This model includes various knowledge-oriented channels/columns (KCs), where each channel integrates prior human knowledge to capture language cues of causation. MCKN uses unique convolutional word filters (wf) generated automatically using WordNet and FrameNet. To reduce MCKN’s dimensionality, we use filter selection and clustering approaches. Our model delivers superior performance on the Alternative Lexicalization (AltLexes) dataset, proving that MCKN is a simpler and distinctive approach for informal datasets.

People are admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) because they need complete support for failing organ systems, constant monitoring, routine nursing care, and treatment. A critical or intensive illness is different from conventional or chronic diseases that most people are likely to have previously encountered. Such an illness is often unexpected and without warnings and can suddenly strike the previously fit. High levels of treatment and support are generally required to prevent life-threatening complications for the patents. Two of the most noticeable actions during an ICU stay are disease diagnosis and severity assessment of the patients. Unlike the majority of previous approaches where diagnosis and severity assessment are studied separately, we treat these actions as two tasks in an integrated procedure that clinicians must be able to quickly and accurately conduct such that patients are given the best possible chance for therapeutic success. In this paper, we propose an integrated disease diagnosis and severity assessment model (IDDSAM) to diagnose and assess diseases. Moreover, accompanying the prediction, we also provide an evidence-based explanation. IDDSAM is a multisource multitask model that is based on an attention mechanism and utilizes shareable information from laboratory tests, bedside monitoring, and complications to support patients' severity assessment and in-hospital disease diagnoses. We use 50,430 ICU cases consisting of 46,520 patients from 50 kinds of diseases over nine classifications to evaluate our proposed model. The experimental results demonstrated that our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art mortality and diagnosis prediction framework by 3.79% on average in terms of accuracy for the mortality prediction tasks and by 14.51% on average for the diagnosis tasks.

As a data augmentation method, masking word is commonly used in many natural language processing tasks. However, most mask methods are based on rules and are not related to downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel masking word generator, named Actor-Critic Mask Model (ACMM), which can adaptively adjust the mask strategy according to the performance of downstream tasks. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we conducted experiments on two causal event extraction datasets. Experiment results show that, compared with various rule-based masking methods, the masked sentences generated by our proposed method can significantly enhance the generalization of the model and improve the model performance.

The era of big textual corpora and machine learning technologies have paved the way for researchers in numerous data mining fields. Among them, causality mining (CM) from textual data has become a significant area of concern and has more attention from researchers. Causality (cause-effect relations) serves as an essential category of relationships, which plays a significant role in question answering, future events predication, discourse comprehension, decision making, future scenario generation, medical text mining, behavior prediction, and textual prediction entailment. While, decades of development techniques for CM are still prone to performance enhancement, especially for ambiguous and implicitly expressed causalities. The ineffectiveness of the early attempts is mainly due to small, ambiguous, heterogeneous, and domain-specific datasets constructed by manually linguistic and syntactic rules. Many researchers have deployed shallow machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to deal with such datasets, and they achieved satisfactory performance. In this survey, an effort has been made to address a comprehensive review of some state-of-the-art shallow ML and DL approaches in CM. We present a detailed taxonomy of CM and discuss popular ML and DL approaches with their comparative weaknesses and strengths, applications, popular datasets, and frameworks. Lastly, the future research challenges are discussed with illustrations of how to transform them into productive future research directions.

Global terrorism has created challenges to the criminal justice system due to its abnormal activities, which lead to financial loss, cyberwar, and cyber-crime. Therefore, it is a global challenge to monitor terrorist group activities by mining criminal information accurately from big data for the estimation of potential risk at national and international levels. Many conventional methods of computation have successfully been implemented, but there is little or no literature to be found that solves these issues through the use of big data analytical tools and techniques. To fill this literature gap, this research is aimed at the determination of accurate criminal data from the huge mass of varieties of data using Hadoop clusters to support Social Justice Organizations in combating terrorist activities on a global scale. To achieve this goal, several algorithmic approaches, including parallelization, annotators and annotations, lemmatization, stop word Remover, term frequency and inverse document frequency, and singular value decomposition, were successfully implemented. The success of this work is empirically compared using the same hardware, software, and system configuration. Moreover, the efficacy of the experiment was tested with criminal data with respect to concepts and matching scores. Eventually, the experimental results showed that the proposed approach was able to expose criminal data with 100% accuracy, while matching of multiple criminal terms with documents had 80% accuracy; the performance of this method was also proved in multiple node clusters. Finally, the reported research creates new ways of thinking for security agencies in combating terrorism at global scale.

As the rapid booming of reviews, a valid sentiment analysis model will significantly boost the review recommendation system’s capability, and present more constructive information for consumers. Topic probabilistic models have already shown many advantages for detecting potential structure of topics and sentiments in reviews corpus. However, most reviews are presented through time-dependent data streams and some respects of the potential structure are unfixed and time-varying, such as topic number and word probability distribution. In this paper, a novel probabilistic topic modelling framework is proposed, called on-line evolutionary sentiment/topic modeling (OESTM), which has the capacity for achieving the optimization of the aforementioned aspects. Firstly, OESTM depends on an improved non-parametric Bayesian model for estimating the best number of topics that can perfectly explain the current time-slice, and analyzes these latent topics and sentiment polarities simultaneously. Secondly, OESTM implements the birth, death and inheritance for detected topics through the transfer of parameters from previous time slices to the updated time slice. The experiments show that significant improvements have been achieved by the proposed model with respect to other state-of-the-art models.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental problem in nature language processing, the objective of which is to identify the most proper sense for an ambiguous word in a given context. Although WSD has been researched over the years, the performance of existing algorithms in terms of accuracy and recall is still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to word sense disambiguation based on topical and semantic association. For a given document, supposing that its topic category is accurately discriminated, the correct sense of the ambiguous term is identified through the corresponding topic and semantic contexts. We firstly extract topic discriminative terms from document and construct topical graph based on topic span intervals to implement topic identification. We then exploit syntactic features, topic span features, and semantic features to disambiguate nouns and verbs in the context of ambiguous word. Finally, we conduct experiments on the standard data set SemCor to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and the results indicate that our approach achieves relatively better performance than existing approaches.