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Empowering Language Understanding with Counterfactual Reasoning

2021/06/06 by Fuli Feng, Jizhi Zhang, Feng, Fuli +7
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining #Topic Modeling

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.03046

openalex publication_date 2021/06/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Present language understanding methods have demonstrated extraordinary ability of recognizing patterns in texts via machine learning. However, existing methods indiscriminately use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that is inherently different from us humans who have counterfactual thinking, e.g., to scrutinize for the hard testing samples. Inspired by this, we propose a Counterfactual Reasoning Model, which mimics the counterfactual thinking by learning from few counterfactual samples. In particular, we devise a generation module to generate representative counterfactual samples for each factual sample, and a retrospective module to retrospect the model prediction by comparing the counterfactual and factual samples. Extensive experiments on sentiment analysis (SA) and natural language inference (NLI) validate the effectiveness of our method.

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