CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs in Disaster Tweets

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02601v1
• Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:45:29 GMT
• Title: CaST: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs in Disaster Tweets
• Authors: Hieu Duong, Eugene Levin, Todd Gary, Long Nguyen,
• Abstract summary: Causal Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Graphs (CaST): A unified framework for causal discovery in disaster domain.<n>We construct an in-house dataset of approximately 167K disaster-related tweets collected during Hurricane Harvey.
• Score: 1.277452693606793
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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