Doing Good or Doing Right? Exploring the Weakness of Commonsense Causal Reasoning Models

Mingyue Han, Yinglin Wang


Abstract
Pretrained language models (PLM) achieve surprising performance on the Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA) task. However, whether PLMs have truly acquired the ability of causal reasoning remains a question. In this paper, we investigate the problem of semantic similarity bias and reveal the vulnerability of current COPA models by certain attacks. Previous solutions that tackle the superficial cues of unbalanced token distribution still encounter the same problem of semantic bias, even more seriously due to the utilization of more training data. We mitigate this problem by simply adding a regularization loss and experimental results show that this solution not only improves the model’s generalization ability, but also assists the models to perform more robustly on a challenging dataset, BCOPA-CE, which has unbiased token distribution and is more difficult for models to distinguish cause and effect.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
151–157
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mingyue Han and Yinglin Wang. 2021. Doing Good or Doing Right? Exploring the Weakness of Commonsense Causal Reasoning Models. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 151–157, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Doing Good or Doing Right? Exploring the Weakness of Commonsense Causal Reasoning Models (Han & Wang, ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.20.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.acl-short.20.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.20.mp4
Code
 badbadcode/weakCOPA
Data
BCOPA-CECOPA