We consider the task of detecting sentences that express causality, as a step towards mining causal relations from texts. To bypass the scarcity of causal instances in relation extraction datasets, we exploit transfer learning, namely ELMO and BERT, using a bidirectional GRU with self-attention (BIGRUATT) as a baseline. We experiment with both generic public relation extraction datasets and a new biomedical causal sentence detection dataset, a subset of which we make publicly available. We find that transfer learning helps only in very small datasets. With larger datasets, BIGRU-ATT reaches a performance plateau, then larger datasets and transfer learning do not help.

In this paper we describe our submission to SemEval-2018 Task 1: Affects in Tweets. The model which we present is an ensemble of various neural architectures and gradient boosted trees, and employs three different types of vectorial tweet representations. Furthermore, our system is language-independent and ranked first in 5 out of the 12 subtasks in which we participated, while achieving competitive results in the remaining ones. Comparatively remarkable performance is observed on both the Arabic and Spanish languages.