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Related papers: How to Make Causal Inferences Using Texts

200 papers

To discover new drugs is to seek and to prove causality. As an emerging approach leveraging human knowledge and creativity, data, and machine intelligence, causal inference holds the promise of reducing cognitive bias and improving decision…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2025-04-09 Tom Michoel , Jitao David Zhang

Does adding a theorem to a paper affect its chance of acceptance? Does labeling a post with the author's gender affect the post popularity? This paper develops a method to estimate such causal effects from observational text data, adjusting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Victor Veitch , Dhanya Sridhar , David M. Blei

Text features that are correlated with class labels, but do not directly cause them, are sometimesuseful for prediction, but they may not be insightful. As an alternative to traditional correlation-basedfeature selection, causal inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Guohou Shan , James Foulds , Shimei Pan

This paper serves as a literature review of methodology concerning the (modern) causal inference methods to address the causal estimand with observational/survey data that have been or will be used in social science research. Mainly, this…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-08-02 Guanghui Pan

Inferring causal effects of treatments is a central goal in many disciplines. The potential outcomes framework is a main statistical approach to causal inference, in which a causal effect is defined as a comparison of the potential outcomes…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-04 Peng Ding , Fan Li

Inferring the effect of interventions within complex systems is a fundamental problem of statistics. A widely studied approach employs structural causal models that postulate noisy functional relations among a set of interacting variables.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-14 David Strieder , Mathias Drton

A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Wenhao Zhang , Ramin Ramezani , Arash Naeim

Adjusting for latent covariates is crucial for estimating causal effects from observational textual data. Most existing methods only account for confounding covariates that affect both treatment and outcome, potentially leading to biased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Yuxiang Zhou , Yulan He

In many fields$\unicode{x2013}$including genomics, epidemiology, natural language processing, social and behavioral sciences, and economics$\unicode{x2013}$it is increasingly important to address causal questions in the context of factor…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-30 Jenna M. Landy , Dafne Zorzetto , Roberta De Vito , Giovanni Parmigiani

No man is an island, as individuals interact and influence one another daily in our society. When social influence takes place in experiments on a population of interconnected individuals, the treatment on a unit may affect the outcomes of…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-30 Edward K. Kao

The standard approach to causal modelling especially in social and health sciences is the potential outcomes framework due to Neyman and Rubin. In this framework, observations are thought to be drawn from a distribution over variables of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-18 Benedikt Höltgen , Robert C. Williamson

Using observed language to understand interpersonal interactions is important in high-stakes decision making. We propose a causal research design for observational (non-experimental) data to estimate the natural direct and indirect effects…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Katherine A. Keith , Douglas Rice , Brendan O'Connor

In biomedical research, repeated measurements within each subject are often processed to remove artifacts and unwanted sources of variation. The resulting data are used to construct derived outcomes that act as proxies for scientific…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Zihang Wang , Razieh Nabi , Benjamin B. Risk

Causality understanding between events is a critical natural language processing task that is helpful in many areas, including health care, business risk management and finance. On close examination, one can find a huge amount of textual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-01 Vivek Khetan , Roshni Ramnani , Mayuresh Anand , Shubhashis Sengupta , Andrew E. Fano

Understanding and inferring causal relationships from texts is a core aspect of human cognition and is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) towards artificial general intelligence. Existing work evaluating LLM causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ryan Saklad , Aman Chadha , Oleg Pavlov , Raha Moraffah

We present a conditional text generation framework that posits sentential expressions of possible causes and effects. This framework depends on two novel resources we develop in the course of this work: a very large-scale collection of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-07-22 Zhongyang Li , Xiao Ding , Ting Liu , J. Edward Hu , Benjamin Van Durme

A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has…

Causal inference is capable of estimating the treatment effect (i.e., the causal effect of treatment on the outcome) to benefit the decision making in various domains. One fundamental challenge in this research is that the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Qian Li , Zhichao Wang , Shaowu Liu , Gang Li , Guandong Xu

This paper develops a framework for identification, estimation, and inference on the causal mechanisms driving endogenous social network formation. Identification is challenging because of unobserved confounders and reverse causality;…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-04-21 Maximilian Kasy , Elizabeth Linos , Sanaz Mobasseri

Recent text-based causal methods attempt to mitigate confounding bias by estimating proxies of confounding variables that are partially or imperfectly measured from unstructured text data. These approaches, however, assume analysts have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Jacob M. Chen , Rohit Bhattacharya , Katherine A. Keith