DoCoGen: Domain Counterfactual Generation for Low Resource Domain Adaptation

Nitay Calderon, Eyal Ben-David, Amir Feder, Roi Reichart


Abstract
Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms have become very successful, but they still struggle when applied to out-of-distribution examples. In this paper we propose a controllable generation approach in order to deal with this domain adaptation (DA) challenge. Given an input text example, our DoCoGen algorithm generates a domain-counterfactual textual example (D-con) - that is similar to the original in all aspects, including the task label, but its domain is changed to a desired one. Importantly, DoCoGen is trained using only unlabeled examples from multiple domains - no NLP task labels or parallel pairs of textual examples and their domain-counterfactuals are required. We show that DoCoGen can generate coherent counterfactuals consisting of multiple sentences. We use the D-cons generated by DoCoGen to augment a sentiment classifier and a multi-label intent classifier in 20 and 78 DA setups, respectively, where source-domain labeled data is scarce. Our model outperforms strong baselines and improves the accuracy of a state-of-the-art unsupervised DA algorithm.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.533
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7727–7746
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.533
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.533
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nitay Calderon, Eyal Ben-David, Amir Feder, and Roi Reichart. 2022. DoCoGen: Domain Counterfactual Generation for Low Resource Domain Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7727–7746, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DoCoGen: Domain Counterfactual Generation for Low Resource Domain Adaptation (Calderon et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.533.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.533.mp4
Code
 nitaytech/docogen