构建首个段落级因果关系标注数据集,助力精准提取生物医学文本中的因果链。
PubMedCausal: A Span-Level Annotated Corpus for Causal Relation Extraction in Biomedical Text

- 基于PubMed摘要构建段落级标注,支持跨句因果关系识别
- 含3945条因果关系与6491对因果对,覆盖隐含与长跨度表达
- 验证模型在不平衡、隐含等复杂场景下的表现,适合临床研究者参考
因果关系抽取(CRE)是生物医学文本挖掘的核心任务,但现有资源常将因果关系与泛化关联混淆,仅限于句子级别标注,或聚焦显式因果线索。这限制了模型在真实生物医学文本中恢复因果陈述的能力评估。本文提出PubMedCausal,一个从PubMed摘要构建的段落级因果关系标注语料库。该语料库包含30,000个段落级条目,其中3,945条为因果关系,6,491对经判定的因果对。每条因果关系均标注完整原因与结果跨度、因果类型及句子性,支持因果检测与全跨度提取的双重评估。我们对判别式编码器与开源生成模型进行了检测与提取任务的基准测试。在因果检测任务中,生物医学编码器表现最佳,PubMedBERT达到F₁=0.7391;在跨度级抽取任务中,最佳生成基线DeepSeek-R1-32B(少样本提示)达到余弦对F₁=0.6765。通过在外部因果数据集上测试迁移学习效果,证明该资源可支持跨数据集评估。结果表明,当前生物医学因果抽取仍面临类别不平衡、长跨度、隐含因果、跨句关系与提示敏感性等挑战。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Causal relation extraction (CRE) is central to biomedical text mining, but current resources often conflate causal relations with broader associations, restrict annotation to sentence-level examples, or focus mainly on explicit causal cues. This limits their usefulness for evaluating whether models can recover causal claims as they are actually expressed in biomedical text. We introduce PubMedCausal, a span-level annotated corpus for biomedical CRE built from PubMed abstracts. The corpus contains 30,000 paragraph-level rows, including 3,945 causal rows and 6,491 adjudicated cause--effect pairs. Each causal relation is annotated with full-text cause and effect spans, causality type, and sententiality, enabling evaluation of both causal detection and full-span causal extraction. We benchmark discriminative encoders and open-source generative models across detection and extraction settings. For causal detection, biomedical encoders are strongest, with PubMedBERT reaching an F$_1$ score of 0.7391. For span-level extraction, the best generative baseline is DeepSeek-R1-32B with few-shot prompting, reaching a Cosine Pair F$_1$ of 0.6765. We further test transfer learning by evaluating PubMedCausal-trained encoders on external causal relation datasets, showing that the resource supports cross-dataset evaluation. Our results show that biomedical CRE remains difficult under class imbalance, long causal spans, implicit causality, inter-sentential relations, and prompt sensitivity. Code and Data can be found here: https://github.com/josiahpaul07/PubMedCausal_Exp
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