end-to-end causal effect estimation
End-To-End Causal Effect Estimation from Unstructured Natural Language Data
Knowing the effect of an intervention is critical for human decision-making, but current approaches for causal effect estimation rely on manual data collection and structuring, regardless of the causal assumptions. We show how large, diverse observational text data can be mined with large language models (LLMs) to produce inexpensive causal effect estimates under appropriate causal assumptions. We introduce NATURAL, a novel family of causal effect estimators built with LLMs that operate over datasets of unstructured text. Our estimators use LLM conditional distributions (over variables of interest, given the text data) to assist in the computation of classical estimators of causal effect. We overcome a number of technical challenges to realize this idea, such as automating data curation and using LLMs to impute missing information.