Rationalization aims to strengthen the interpretability of NLP models by extracting a subset of human-intelligible pieces of their inputting texts. Conventional works generally employ the maximum mutual information (MMI) criterion to find the rationale that is most indicative of the target label. However, this criterion can be influenced by spurious features that correlate with the causal rationale or the target label. Instead of attempting to rectify the issues of the MMI criterion, we propose a novel criterion to uncover the causal rationale, termed the Minimum Conditional Dependence (MCD) criterion, which is grounded on our finding that the non-causal features and the target label are \emph{d-separated} by the causal rationale. By minimizing the dependence between the non-selected parts of the input and the target label conditioned on the selected rationale candidate, all the causes of the label are compelled to be selected. In this study, we employ a simple and practical measure for dependence, specifically the KL-divergence, to validate our proposed MCD criterion. Empirically, we demonstrate that MCD improves the F1 score by up to 13.7% compared to previous state-of-the-art MMI-based methods.Our code is in an anonymous repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCD-CE88.

Rationalization aims to strengthen the interpretability of NLP models by extracting a subset of human-intelligible pieces of their inputting texts. Conventional works generally employ the maximum mutual information (MMI) criterion to find the rationale that is most indicative of the target label. However, this criterion can be influenced by spurious features that correlate with the causal rationale or the target label. Instead of attempting to rectify the issues of the MMI criterion, we propose a novel criterion to uncover the causal rationale, termed the Minimum Conditional Dependence (MCD) criterion, which is grounded on our finding that the non-causal features and the target label are \emph{d-separated} by the causal rationale. By minimizing the dependence between the non-selected parts of the input and the target label conditioned on the selected rationale candidate, all the causes of the label are compelled to be selected. In this study, we employ a simple and practical measure for dependence, specifically the KL-divergence, to validate our proposed MCD criterion.

In former articles, we have been looking at many different concepts related to Bayesian Networks: how to represent them in a compact manner, their reasoning patterns, and I-Map. In this article, we will take a look at D-separation and try to understand it both intuitively and mathematically.

We introduce Joint Causal Inference (JCI), a powerful formulation of causal discovery from multiple datasets that allows to jointly learn both the causal structure and targets of interventions from statistical independences in pooled data. Compared with existing constraint-based approaches for causal discovery from multiple data sets, JCI offers several advantages: it allows for several different types of interventions in a unified fashion, it can learn intervention targets, it systematically pools data across different datasets which improves the statistical power of independence tests, and most importantly, it improves on the accuracy and identifiability of the predicted causal relations. A technical complication that arises in JCI is the occurrence of faithfulness violations due to deterministic relations. We propose a simple but effective strategy for dealing with this type of faithfulness violations. We implement it in ACID, a determinism-tolerant extension of Ancestral Causal Inference (ACI) (Magliacane et al., 2016), a recently proposed logic-based causal discovery method that improves reliability of the output by exploiting redundant information in the data. We illustrate the benefits of JCI with ACID with an evaluation on a simulated dataset.