A Rationale-centric Counterfactual Data Augmentation Method for Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution

Based on Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), event coreference resolution (ECR) systems have demonstrated outstanding performance in clustering coreferential events across documents. However, the state-of-the-art system exhibits an excessive reliance on the'triggers lexical matching' spurious pattern in the input mention pair text. We formalize the decision-making process of the baseline ECR system using a Structural Causal Model (SCM), aiming to identify spurious and causal associations (i.e., rationales) within the ECR task. Leveraging the debiasing capability of counterfactual data augmentation, we develop a rationale-centric counterfactual data augmentation method with LLM-in-the-loop. This method is specialized for pairwise input in the Figure 1: The distribution of'triggers lexical matching' ECR system, where we conduct direct interventions in mention pairs from ECB+ training set, along with a on triggers and context to mitigate the false negative example from Held et al.'s system which spurious association while emphasizing the causation.