AbstractCausal event extraction (CEE) aims to identify and extract cause‐effect event pairs from texts, which is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recent research treat CEE as a sequence labeling problem. However, the linguistic complexity and ambiguity of textual description results in the low accuracy of extractors. To address the above issues, considering the prior knowledge like the causal network constructed based on the causal indicators, which can represent information transition between cause and effect, may helpful for CEE. In this article, we propose causality‐associated graph neural network to incorporate in‐domain knowledge by taking important causal words into account. External causal knowledge is modeled as causal associated graph (CAG). Then we use graph neural networks (GNN) to capture the complex relationship of intraevent mentions and interevent causality in a sentence based on the relationship obtained from CAG. Finally, sentence sequence and prior causal knowledge of GNN embedding are fed into multiscaled convolution and bidirectional long short‐term memory networks. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art baseline.