causal-text

This is an implementation of the paper Causal Effects of Linguistic Properties.

It is a package for computing the causal effects of text. Concretely this means algorithms for quantifying the degree of influence some user-defiend property (E.g. sentiment, respect) has on an outcome (email reply time), while controlling for potential confounds (topic, etc).

Setup

pip install -r requirements.txt

Quickstart

Run the full TextCause algorithm on a simulated dataset.

python main.py --run_cb 

Run the full TextCause algorithm on a dataset of your choosing:

python main.py --run_cb --data /path/to/your/data.tsv 

Usage Details

• Prepare your data. This system expects a TSV file, with columns
  • text: string, the text you're studying
  • Y: int, binary outcome of interest
  • C: int, categorical confounder
  • T_proxy: int, your binary treatment indicator, e.g. the output of a classifier or lexicon
  • T_true (optional): int, binary indicator for the "true" (i.e. non-predicted) treatment
• Run the system.
  • For python main.py --data /path/to/your/data.tsv --no_simulate
  • And if you want to run BERT for text adjustment (i.e. the full TextCause algorithm): python main.py --data /path/to/your/data.tsv --no_simulate --run_cb
  • If you want to run the simulation: python main.py --run_cb
• Look at your results. When finished, the system will print out all of its hyperparameters and a bunch of different ATE estimates. The estimators are:
  • unadj_T: the unadjusted effect of T
  • ate_T: backdoor-adjusted effect of T
  • unadj_T_proxy: the unadjusted effect of T proxy
  • ate_T_proxy: backdoor-adjusted effect of T proxy
  • ate_matrix: matrix-adjusted effect of T_proxy using the measurement model P(T_hat | T)
  • ate_T_plus_reg: backdoor-adjusted effect of a boosted T
  • ate_T_plus_pu: backdoor-adjusted effect of a boosted T, but where the label improvement comes from a one-class classifier instead of a logistic regression
  • ate_cb_T_proxy: text-adjusted ATE estimate
  • ate_cb_T_plus: the full TextCause algorithm; test adjustment + T boosting.

Citation

Please cite this paper if you make use of the repo:

@inproceedings{pryzant2021causal,
 author = {Pryzant, Reid and Card, Dallas and Jurafsky, Dan and Veitch, Victor and Sridhar, Dhanya},
 booktitle = {Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL)},
 link = {https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/pryzant2021causal.pdf},
 title = {Causal Effects of Linguistic Properties},
 url = {https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/pryzant2021causal.pdf},
 year = {2021}
}