CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs in Disaster Tweets
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| author | Duong, Hieu Levin, Eugene Gary, Todd Nguyen, Long |
| author_facet | Duong, Hieu Levin, Eugene Gary, Todd Nguyen, Long |
| contents | Understanding causality between real-world events from social media is essential for situational awareness, yet existing causal discovery methods often overlook the interplay between semantic, spatial, and temporal contexts. We propose CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs, a unified framework for causal discovery in disaster domain that integrates semantic similarity and spatio-temporal proximity using Large Language Models (LLMs) pretrained on disaster datasets. CaST constructs an event graph for each window of tweets. Each event extracted from tweets is represented as a node embedding enriched with its contextual semantics, geographic coordinates, and temporal features. These event nodes are then connected to form a spatio-temporal event graph, which is processed using a multi-head Graph Attention Network (GAT) \cite{gat} to learn directed causal relationships. We construct an in-house dataset of approximately 167K disaster-related tweets collected during Hurricane Harvey and annotated following the MAVEN-ERE schema. Experimental results show that CaST achieves superior performance over both traditional and state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further confirm that incorporating spatial and temporal signals substantially improves both recall and stability during training. Overall, CaST demonstrates that integrating spatio-temporal reasoning into event graphs enables more robust and interpretable causal discovery in disaster-related social media text. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02601 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs in Disaster Tweets Duong, Hieu Levin, Eugene Gary, Todd Nguyen, Long Social and Information Networks Artificial Intelligence Understanding causality between real-world events from social media is essential for situational awareness, yet existing causal discovery methods often overlook the interplay between semantic, spatial, and temporal contexts. We propose CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs, a unified framework for causal discovery in disaster domain that integrates semantic similarity and spatio-temporal proximity using Large Language Models (LLMs) pretrained on disaster datasets. CaST constructs an event graph for each window of tweets. Each event extracted from tweets is represented as a node embedding enriched with its contextual semantics, geographic coordinates, and temporal features. These event nodes are then connected to form a spatio-temporal event graph, which is processed using a multi-head Graph Attention Network (GAT) \cite{gat} to learn directed causal relationships. We construct an in-house dataset of approximately 167K disaster-related tweets collected during Hurricane Harvey and annotated following the MAVEN-ERE schema. Experimental results show that CaST achieves superior performance over both traditional and state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further confirm that incorporating spatial and temporal signals substantially improves both recall and stability during training. Overall, CaST demonstrates that integrating spatio-temporal reasoning into event graphs enables more robust and interpretable causal discovery in disaster-related social media text. |
| title | CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs in Disaster Tweets |
| topic | Social and Information Networks Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02601 |