mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Challenges of Using Text Classifiers for Causal Inference

arXiv 1810.00956 ↗First posted 1 Oct 2018cs.CL cs.LGcited by 33

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Abstract (arXiv)

Causal understanding is essential for many kinds of decision-making, but causal inference from observational data has typically only been applied to structured, low-dimensional datasets. While text classifiers produce low-dimensional outputs, their use in causal inference has not previously been studied. To facilitate causal analyses based on language data, we consider the role that text classifiers can play in causal inference through established modeling mechanisms from the causality literature on missing data and measurement error. We demonstrate how to conduct causal analyses using text classifiers on simulated and Yelp data, and discuss the opportunities and challenges of future work that uses text data in causal inference.

Key facts. Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 12; 2022: 7; 2023: 2; 2024: 3; 2025: 4; 2026: 5.

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  1. 2021Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyondcited by 178
  2. 2021Counterfactual Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Re-identificationcited by 114
  3. 2021I Wish I Would Have Loved This One, But I Didn't -- A Multilingual Dataset for Counterfactual Detection in Product Reviewscited by 45
  4. 2022A Causal Lens for Controllable Text Generationcited by 45
  5. 2022Neuro-Symbolic Procedural Planning with Commonsense Promptingcited by 28
  6. 2024On Behalf of the Stakeholders: Trends in NLP Model Interpretability in the Era of LLMscited by 25
  7. 2024Off-Policy Evaluation of Slate Bandit Policies via Optimizing Abstractioncited by 17
  8. 2022Causal Intervention Improves Implicit Sentiment Analysiscited by 16
  9. 2022Causal Estimation for Text Data with (Apparent) Overlap Violationscited by 15
  10. 2021Everything Has a Cause: Leveraging Causal Inference in Legal Text Analysiscited by 14
  11. 2021Enhancing Model Robustness and Fairness with Causality: A Regularization Approachcited by 11
  12. 2022A Survey of Deep Causal Models and Their Industrial Applicationscited by 10
21 more
  1. 2021Generating Synthetic Text Data to Evaluate Causal Inference Methodscited by 9
  2. 2021Unsupervised Editing for Counterfactual Storiescited by 8
  3. 2023RCT Rejection Sampling for Causal Estimation Evaluationcited by 7
  4. 2024Proximal Causal Inference With Text Datacited by 7
  5. 2021CausalNLP: A Practical Toolkit for Causal Inference with Textcited by 5
  6. 2023Causal Inference from Text: Unveiling Interactions between Variablescited by 5
  7. 2021Bayesian Topic Regression for Causal Inferencecited by 4
  8. 2021Text as Causal Mediators: Research Design for Causal Estimates of Differential Treatment of Social Groups via Language Aspectscited by 3
  9. 2022CKH: Causal Knowledge Hierarchy for Estimating Structural Causal Models from Data and Priorscited by 2
  10. 2025LLM-Driven Treatment Effect Estimation Under Inference Time Text Confoundingcited by 2
  11. 2025Text Rationalization for Robust Causal Effect Estimationcited by 2
  12. 2026LIBERTy: A Causal Framework for Benchmarking Concept-Based Explanations of LLMs with Structural Counterfactualscited by 2
  13. 2021Identifying Causal Influences on Publication Trends and Behavior: A Case Study of the Computational Linguistics Communitycited by 1
  14. 2022IDIAPers @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Extracting Cause-Effect-Signal Triplets via Pre-trained Autoregressive Language Modelcited by 1
  15. 2026Reproducibility is not construct validity: LLM measurement of institutionally situated communicationcited by 1
  16. 2021What do writing features tell us about AI papers?cited by 0
  17. 2025Causality-Driven Neural Network Repair: Challenges and Opportunitiescited by 0
  18. 2025Annotation-Assisted Learning of Treatment Policies From Multimodal Electronic Health Recordscited by 0
  19. 2026Mutually Causal Semantic Distillation Network for Zero-Shot Learningcited by 0
  20. 2026Supervised Learning Objectives for High-Dimensional Treatment Effectscited by 0
  21. 2026Exploring Sparse Autoencoders in Text-Based Causal Confounding Adjustmentcited by 0