CORE: A Retrieve-then-Edit Framework for Counterfactual Data Generation

Tanay Dixit, Bhargavi Paranjape, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer


Abstract
Counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) – i.e., adding minimally perturbed inputs during training – helps reduce model reliance on spurious correlations and improves generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Prior work on generating counterfactuals only considered restricted classes of perturbations, limiting their effectiveness. We present Counterfactual Generation via Retrieval and Editing (CORE), a retrieval-augmented generation framework for creating diverse counterfactual perturbations for CDA. For each training example, CORE first performs a dense retrieval over a task-related unlabeled text corpus using a learned bi-encoder and extracts relevant counterfactual excerpts. CORE then incorporates these into prompts to a large language model with few-shot learning capabilities, for counterfactual editing. Conditioning language model edits on naturally occurring data results in more diverse perturbations. Experiments on natural language inference and sentiment analysis benchmarks show that CORE counterfactuals are more effective at improving generalization to OOD data compared to other DA approaches. We also show that the CORE retrieval framework can be used to encourage diversity in manually authored perturbations.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.216
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2964–2984
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.216
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.216
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tanay Dixit, Bhargavi Paranjape, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2022. CORE: A Retrieve-then-Edit Framework for Counterfactual Data Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 2964–2984, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CORE: A Retrieve-then-Edit Framework for Counterfactual Data Generation (Dixit et al., Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.216.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.216.mp4