Cited by 222Advanced Causal Inference TechniquesComputational and Text Analysis MethodsNatural Language Processing Techniques

Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond

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Feder, Amir, Keith, Katherine A., Manzoor, Emaad, Pryzant, Reid, Sridhar, Dhanya, Wood-Doughty, Zach, Eisenstein, Jacob, Grimmer, Justin +5 more·2022·Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the challenges and opportunities in the application of causal inference to the textual domain, with its unique properties. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects with text, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the NLP community.1

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  1. PMLR.
  2. Kevin Meng, David Bau, Alex Andonian, and Yonatan Belinkov. 2022. Locating and edit- ing factual knowledge in GPT. arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.05262. · arXiv
  3. Judea Pearl. 2009. Causality. Cambridge Uni- versity Press.
  4. Tongshuang Wu, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Jeffrey Heer, and Daniel S. Weld. 2021. Polyjuice: Au- tomated, general-purpose counterfactual gener- ation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.00288. · arXiv
  5. PMLR.
  6. Yi-Fan Zhang, Hanlin Zhang, Zachary C. Lipton, Li Erran Li, and Eric P. Xing. 2022. Can transformers be strong treatment effect estimators? arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.01336. · arXiv

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Authors
Feder, A., Keith, K. A., Manzoor, E., Pryzant, R., Sridhar, D., Wood-Doughty, Z., Eisenstein, J., Grimmer, J., Reichart, R., Roberts, M. E., Stewart, B. M., Veitch, V., & Yang, D.
Affiliations
  • Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (IL)
  • Williams College (US)
  • University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
  • Microsoft (United States) (US)
  • Columbia University (US)
  • Northwestern University (US)
  • Google (United States) (US)
  • Stanford University (US)
  • University of California San Diego (US)
  • Princeton University (US)
  • Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
Venue
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Published
2022
Volume
10
Pages
1138-1158
ISSN
2307-387X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4312516176
Cited by
220
References
146
Citations by year
2026: 42 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 51 · 2023: 50 · 2022: 37 · 2021: 4
FWCI
30.78
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Advanced Causal Inference Techniques
  • Social Sciences › General Social Sciences › Computational and Text Analysis Methods
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
causal inference, natural language processing, causal effect estimation, confounding, interpretability, robustness, fairness, benchmark dataset

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