Zero-Shot Event Causality Identification via Multisource Evidence Fuzzy Aggregation With Large Language Models

Event causality identification (ECI) aims to detect causal relationships between events in textual contexts. Existing ECI models predominantly rely on supervised methodologies, suffering from dependence on large-scale annotated data. Although large language models (LLMs) enable zero-shot ECI, they are prone to causal hallucination—erroneously establishing spurious causal links. To address these challenges, we propose MEFA, a novel zero-shot ECI model based on multisource evidence fuzzy aggregation. First, we decompose causality reasoning into three main tasks (temporality determination, necessity analysis, and sufficiency verification) complemented by three auxiliary tasks. Second, leveraging meticulously designed prompts, we guide LLMs to generate uncertain responses and deterministic outputs. Finally, we quantify LLM's responses of subtasks and employ fuzzy aggregation to integrate these evidence for causality scoring and causality determination. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that MEFA outperforms second-best unsupervised baselines by 6.2% in$F1$-score and 9.3% in precision, while significantly reducing hallucination-induced errors. In-depth analysis verify the effectiveness of task decomposition and the superiority of fuzzy aggregation.