2024/02/01 by Pirmin Lemberger, Lemberger, Pirmin, Antoine Saillenfest +1 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #62Fxx #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.00711
openalex publication_date 2024/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
One well motivated explanation method for classifiers leverages counterfactuals which are hypothetical events identical to real observations in all aspects except for one feature. Constructing such counterfactual poses specific challenges for texts, however, as some attribute values may not necessarily align with plausible real-world events. In this paper we propose a simple method for generating counterfactuals by intervening in the space of text representations which bypasses this limitation. We argue that our interventions are minimally disruptive and that they are theoretically sound as they align with counterfactuals as defined in Pearl's causal inference framework. To validate our method, we conducted experiments first on a synthetic dataset and then on a realistic dataset of counterfactuals. This allows for a direct comparison between classifier predictions based on ground truth counterfactuals - obtained through explicit text interventions - and our counterfactuals, derived through interventions in the representation space. Eventually, we study a real world scenario where our counterfactuals can be leveraged both for explaining a classifier and for bias mitigation.