Causal-Bert TF2

This is a reference Tensorflow 2.1 / Keras implementation of the "causal bert" method described in Using Text Embeddings for Causal Inference. This method provides a way to estimate causal effects when either (1) a treatment and outcome are both influenced by confounders, and information about the confounding is contained in a text passage. For example, we consider estimating the effect of adding a theorem to a paper on whether or not the paper is accepted at a computer science conference, adjusting for the paper's abstract (topic, writing quality, etc) (2) a treatment affecting an outcome is mediated by text. For example, we consider whether the score of a reddit post is affected by publicly listing the gender of the author, adjusting for the text of the post

This is a reference implementation to make it easier for others to use and build on the project. The official code, including instructions to reproduce the experiments, is available here. (In Tensorflow 1.13)

There is also a reference implementation in pytorch.

All code in tf_official is taken from https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official (and subject to their liscensing requirements)

Instructions

1. Download BERT-Base, Uncased pre-trained model following instructions at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/nlp/bert Extract to ../pre-trained/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12

2. in src/

    run python -m PeerRead.model.run_causal_bert \
        --input_files=../dat/PeerRead/proc/arxiv-all.tf_record \ 
        --bert_config_file=../pre-trained/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12/bert_config.json \ 
        --init_checkpoint=../pre-trained/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12/bert_model.ckpt \ 
        --vocab_file=../pre-trained/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12/vocab.txt \ 
        --seed=0 \ 
        --strategy_type=mirror \ 
        --train_batch_size=32

Notes

1. This reference implementation doesn't necessarily reproduce paper results---I haven't messed around w/ weighting of unsupervised and supervised losses
2. PeerRead data from: github.com/allenai/PeerRead
3. Model performance is usually significantly improved by doing unsupervised pre-training on your dataset. See PeerRead/model/run_pretraining for how to do this