Measuring Causal Effects of Data Statistics on Language Model's `Factual' Predictions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14251v2
• Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2023 07:18:59 GMT
• Title: Measuring Causal Effects of Data Statistics on Language Model's `Factual' Predictions
• Authors: Yanai Elazar, Nora Kassner, Shauli Ravfogel, Amir Feder, Abhilasha Ravichander, Marius Mosbach, Yonatan Belinkov, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Yoav Goldberg
• Abstract summary: Large amounts of training data are one of the major reasons for the high performance of state-of-the-art NLP models. We provide a language for describing how training data influences predictions, through a causal framework. Our framework bypasses the need to retrain expensive models and allows us to estimate causal effects based on observational data alone.
• Score: 59.284907093349425
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large amounts of training data are one of the major reasons for the high performance of state-of-the-art NLP models. But what exactly in the training data causes a model to make a certain prediction? We seek to answer this question by providing a language for describing how training data influences predictions, through a causal framework. Importantly, our framework bypasses the need to retrain expensive models and allows us to estimate causal effects based on observational data alone. Addressing the problem of extracting factual knowledge from pretrained language models (PLMs), we focus on simple data statistics such as co-occurrence counts and show that these statistics do influence the predictions of PLMs, suggesting that such models rely on shallow heuristics. Our causal framework and our results demonstrate the importance of studying datasets and the benefits of causality for understanding NLP models.

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