Counterfactual Generator: A Weakly-Supervised Method for Named Entity Recognition

Past progress on neural models has proven that named entity recognition is no longer a problem if we have enough labeled data. However, collecting enough data and annotating them are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. In this paper, we decompose the sentence into two parts: entity and context, and rethink the relationship between them and model performance from a causal perspective. Based on this, we propose the Counterfactual Generator, which generates counterfactual examples by the interventions on the existing observational examples to enhance the original dataset. Experiments across three datasets show that our method improves the generalization ability of models under limited observational examples. Besides, we provide a theoretical foundation by using a structural causal model to explore the spurious correlations between input features and output labels. We investigate the causal effects of entity or context on model performance under both conditions: the non-augmented and the augmented. Interestingly, we find that the non-spurious correlations are more located in entity representation rather than context representation. As a result, our method eliminates part of the spurious correlations between context representation and output labels. The code is available at https://github.com/xijiz/cfgen.