Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing

Nan Xu, Fei Wang, Bangzheng Li, Mingtao Dong, Muhao Chen


Abstract
Entity typing aims at predicting one or more words that describe the type(s) of a specific mention in a sentence. Due to shortcuts from surface patterns to annotated entity labels and biased training, existing entity typing models are subject to the problem of spurious correlations. To comprehensively investigate the faithfulness and reliability of entity typing methods, we first systematically define distinct kinds of model biases that are reflected mainly from spurious correlations. Particularly, we identify six types of existing model biases, including mention-context bias, lexical overlapping bias, named entity bias, pronoun bias, dependency bias, and overgeneralization bias. To mitigate model biases, we then introduce a counterfactual data augmentation method. By augmenting the original training set with their debiasedcounterparts, models are forced to fully comprehend sentences and discover the fundamental cues for entity typing, rather than relying on spurious correlations for shortcuts. Experimental results on the UFET dataset show our counterfactual data augmentation approach helps improve generalization of different entity typing models with consistently better performance on both the original and debiased test sets.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.592
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8642–8658
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.592
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.592
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nan Xu, Fei Wang, Bangzheng Li, Mingtao Dong, and Muhao Chen. 2022. Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8642–8658, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing (Xu et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.592.pdf