Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimates

Katherine Keith, David Jensen, Brendan O’Connor


Abstract
Many applications of computational social science aim to infer causal conclusions from non-experimental data. Such observational data often contains confounders, variables that influence both potential causes and potential effects. Unmeasured or latent confounders can bias causal estimates, and this has motivated interest in measuring potential confounders from observed text. For example, an individual’s entire history of social media posts or the content of a news article could provide a rich measurement of multiple confounders. Yet, methods and applications for this problem are scattered across different communities and evaluation practices are inconsistent. This review is the first to gather and categorize these examples and provide a guide to data-processing and evaluation decisions. Despite increased attention on adjusting for confounding using text, there are still many open problems, which we highlight in this paper.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.474
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5332–5344
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.474
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.474
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Katherine Keith, David Jensen, and Brendan O’Connor. 2020. Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimates. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5332–5344, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text and Causal Inference: A Review of Using Text to Remove Confounding from Causal Estimates (Keith et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.474.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929140