Causal Effects of Linguistic Properties

Reid Pryzant, Dallas Card, Dan Jurafsky, Victor Veitch, Dhanya Sridhar


Abstract
We consider the problem of using observational data to estimate the causal effects of linguistic properties. For example, does writing a complaint politely lead to a faster response time? How much will a positive product review increase sales? This paper addresses two technical challenges related to the problem before developing a practical method. First, we formalize the causal quantity of interest as the effect of a writer’s intent, and establish the assumptions necessary to identify this from observational data. Second, in practice, we only have access to noisy proxies for the linguistic properties of interest—e.g., predictions from classifiers and lexicons. We propose an estimator for this setting and prove that its bias is bounded when we perform an adjustment for the text. Based on these results, we introduce TextCause, an algorithm for estimating causal effects of linguistic properties. The method leverages (1) distant supervision to improve the quality of noisy proxies, and (2) a pre-trained language model (BERT) to adjust for the text. We show that the proposed method outperforms related approaches when estimating the effect of Amazon review sentiment on semi-simulated sales figures. Finally, we present an applied case study investigating the effects of complaint politeness on bureaucratic response times.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.323
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4095–4109
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.323
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.323
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Reid Pryzant, Dallas Card, Dan Jurafsky, Victor Veitch, and Dhanya Sridhar. 2021. Causal Effects of Linguistic Properties. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4095–4109, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Causal Effects of Linguistic Properties (Pryzant et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.323.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.323.mp4
Code
 rpryzant/causal-text