Counterfactual statements, which describe events that did not or cannot take place, are beneficial to numerous NLP applications. Hence, we consider the problem of counterfactual detection (CFD) and seek to enhance the CFD models. Previous models are reliant on clue phrases to predict counterfactuality, so they suffer from significant performance drop when clue phrase hints do not exist during testing. Moreover, these models tend to predict non-counterfactuals over counterfactuals. To address these issues, we propose to integrate neural topic model into the CFD model to capture the global semantics of the input statement. We continue to causally intervene the hidden representations of the CFD model to balance the effect of the class labels. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art CFD and bias-resolving methods in both the CFD and other bias-sensitive tasks.
Counterfactual statements describe events that did not or cannot take place. We consider the problem of counterfactual detection (CFD) in product reviews. For this purpose, we annotate a multilingual CFD dataset from Amazon product reviews covering counterfactual statements written in English, German, and Japanese languages. The dataset is unique as it contains counterfactuals in multiple languages, covers a new application area of e-commerce reviews, and provides high quality professional annotations. We train CFD models using different text representation methods and classifiers. We find that these models are robust against the selectional biases introduced due to cue phrase-based sentence selection. Moreover, our CFD dataset is compatible with prior datasets and can be merged to learn accurate CFD models. Applying machine translation on English counterfactual examples to create multilingual data performs poorly, demonstrating the language-specificity of this problem, which has been ignored so far.
Experimental Testing of Hybrid AI Node implemented entirely on free cloud computing infrastructure. The ultimate goal of this research is to create modular reusable hybrid neuro-symbolic architecture for Artificial Intelligence. As a test case I model natural language comprehension of causal relations from open domain text corpus that combines semi-supervised language model (Huggingface Transformers) with constituency and dependency parsers (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence). The experimental results presented in this paper show potential for SOTA-level performance and demonstrate hybrid Artificial Intelligence in action. On SemEval-2020 Task 5 Subtask 1 ETHAN achieves F1 0.878 which is the second best result at the time of my writing. On Subtask 2 ETHAN currently scores 0.673 which is within the top ten results. All code used for experiments is available as open source and can be executed directly from the web browser without any installation or configuration. I briefly discuss some theoretical approaches that led to the proposed solutions and future directions of this research.
We present a counterfactual recognition (CR) task, the shared Task 5 of SemEval-2020. Counterfactuals describe potential outcomes (consequents) produced by actions or circumstances that did not happen or cannot happen and are counter to the facts (antecedent). Counterfactual thinking is an important characteristic of the human cognitive system; it connects antecedents and consequents with causal relations. Our task provides a benchmark for counterfactual recognition in natural language with two subtasks. Subtask-1 aims to determine whether a given sentence is a counterfactual statement or not. Subtask-2 requires the participating systems to extract the antecedent and consequent in a given counterfactual statement. During the SemEval-2020 official evaluation period, we received 27 submissions to Subtask-1 and 11 to Subtask-2. The data, baseline code, and leaderboard can be found at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/21691. The data and baseline code are also available at https://zenodo.org/record/3932442.
In this paper, we describe an approach for modelling causal reasoning in natural language by detecting counterfactuals in text using multi-head self-attention weights. We use pre-trained transformer models to extract contextual embeddings and self-attention weights from the text. We show the use of convolutional layers to extract task-specific features from these self-attention weights. Further, we describe a fine-tuning approach with a common base model for knowledge sharing between the two closely related sub-tasks for counterfactual detection. We analyze and compare the performance of various transformer models in our experiments. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis with the multi-head self-attention weights to interpret our models' dynamics.
We can consider Counterfactuals as belonging in the domain of Discourse structure and semantics, A core area in Natural Language Understanding and in this paper, we introduce an approach to resolving counterfactual detection as well as the indexing of the antecedents and consequents of Counterfactual statements. While Transfer learning is already being applied to several NLP tasks, It has the characteristics to excel in a novel number of tasks. We show that detecting Counterfactuals is a straightforward Binary Classification Task that can be implemented with minimal adaptation on already existing model Architectures, thanks to a well annotated training data set,and we introduce a new end to end pipeline to process antecedents and consequents as an entity recognition task, thus adapting them into Token Classification.