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arXiv · 2109.05213

Uncovering Main Causalities for Long-tailed Information Extraction

Abstract

Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structural information from unstructured texts. In practice, long-tailed distributions caused by the selection bias of a dataset, may lead to incorrect correlations, also known as spurious correlations, between entities and labels in the conventional likelihood models. This motivates us to propose counterfactual IE (CFIE), a novel framework that aims to uncover the main causalities behind data in the view of causal inference. Specifically, 1) we first introduce a unified structural causal model (SCM) for various IE tasks, describing the relationships among variables; 2) with our SCM, we then generate counterfactuals based on an explicit language structure to better calculate the direct causal effect during the inference stage; 3) we further propose a novel debiasing approach to yield more robust predictions. Experiments on three IE tasks across five public datasets show the effectiveness of our CFIE model in mitigating the spurious correlation issues.

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BibTeXRIS

Guoshun Nan, Jiaqi Zeng, Rui Qiao, Zhijiang Guo, Wei Lu. 2021-09-11. Uncovering Main Causalities for Long-tailed Information Extraction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05213

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