Zero-shot Cross-Lingual Counterfactual Detection via Automatic Extraction and Prediction of Clue Phrases

Asahi Ushio, Danushka Bollegala


Abstract
Counterfactual statements describe events that did not or cannot take place unless some conditions are satisfied. Existing counterfactual detection (CFD) methods assume the availability of manually labelled statements for each language they consider, limiting the broad applicability of CFD. In this paper, we consider the problem of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning for CFD. Specifically, we propose a novel loss function based on the clue phrase prediction for generalising a CFD model trained on a source language to multiple target languages, without requiring any human-labelled data. We obtain clue phrases that express various language-specific lexical indicators of counterfactuality in the target language in an unsupervised manner using a neural alignment model. We evaluate our method on the Amazon Multilingual Counterfactual Dataset (AMCD) for English, German, and Japanese languages in the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer setup where no manual annotations are used for the target language during training. The best CFD model fine-tuned on XLM-R improves the macro F1 score by 25% for German and 20% for Japanese target languages compared to a model that is trained only using English source language data.
Anthology ID:
2022.mrl-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Duygu Ataman, Hila Gonen, Sebastian Ruder, Orhan Firat, Gözde Gül Sahin, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov
Venue:
MRL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
28–37
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.mrl-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.mrl-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Asahi Ushio and Danushka Bollegala. 2022. Zero-shot Cross-Lingual Counterfactual Detection via Automatic Extraction and Prediction of Clue Phrases. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL), pages 28–37, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-shot Cross-Lingual Counterfactual Detection via Automatic Extraction and Prediction of Clue Phrases (Ushio & Bollegala, MRL 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.mrl-1.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.mrl-1.3.mp4