Zero-shot Causal Graph Extrapolation from Text via LLMs

Abstract

We evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to infer causal relations from natural language. Compared to traditional natural language processing and deep learning techniques, LLMs show competitive performance in a benchmark of pairwise relations without needing (explicit) training samples. This motivates us to extend our approach to extrapolating causal graphs through iterated pairwise queries. We perform a preliminary analysis on a benchmark of biomedical abstracts with ground-truth causal graphs validated by experts. The results are promising and support the adoption of LLMs for such a crucial step in causal inference, especially in medical domains, where the amount of scientific text to analyse might be huge, and the causal statements are often implicit.