Mining causal knowledge from autism newspapers

Autism is a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people perceive the world and interact with others. It has received enormous attention from both the academia and media. The causes of autism carried by the news media have an even bigger impact on the people’s opinion about autistic people and various treatments. In this research, we use machine reading technique to automatically extract causal relationships from autism news. We reveal the major diseases, causes and symptoms related with autism. We find that vaccine, gene and parenting are the main causes reported in the history of autism news. We also demonstrate the coverage of the causal relationships across time which shows gene has become the most important cause of autism surpass vaccine