In (Beckers, 2025) I introduced nondeterministic causal models as a generalization of Pearl's standard deterministic causal models. I here take advantage of the increased expressivity offered by these models to offer a novel definition of actual causation (that also applies to deterministic models). Instead of motivating the definition by way of (often subjective) intuitions about examples, I proceed by developing it based entirely on the unique function that it can fulfil in communicating and learning a causal model. First I generalize the more basic notion of counterfactual dependence, second I show how this notion has a vital role to play in the logic of causal discovery, third I introduce the notion of a structural simplification of a causal model, and lastly I bring both notions together in my definition of actual causation. Although novel, the resulting definition arrives at verdicts that are almost identical to those of my previous definition (Beckers, 2021, 2022).

Deep Learning models enjoy considerable success in Natural Language Processing. While deep architectures produce useful representations that lead to improvements in various tasks, they are often difficult to interpret. This makes the analysis of learned structures particularly difficult. In this paper, we rely on empirical tests to see whether a particular structure makes sense. We present an analysis of the Semi-Supervised Recursive Autoencoder, a well-known model that produces structural representations of text. We show that for certain tasks, the structure of the autoencoder can be significantly reduced without loss of classification accuracy and we evaluate the produced structures using human judgment.