Towards Model Robustness: Generating Contextual Counterfactuals for Entities in Relation Extraction

The goal of relation extraction (RE) is to extract the semantic relations between/among entities in the text. As a fundamental task in information systems, it is crucial to ensure the robustness of RE models. Despite the high accuracy current deep neural models have achieved in RE tasks, they are easily affected by spurious correlations. One solution to this problem is to train the model with counterfactually augmented data (CAD) such that it can learn the causation rather than the confounding. However, no attempt has been made on generating counterfactuals for RE tasks. In this paper, we formulate the problem of automatically generating CAD for RE tasks from an entity-centric viewpoint, and develop a novel approach to derive contextual counterfactuals for entities. Specifically, we exploit two elementary topological properties, i.e., the centrality and the shortest path, in syntactic and semantic dependency graphs, to first identify and then intervene on the contextual causal features for entities. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on four RE datasets by combining our proposed approach with a variety of RE backbones. Results prove that our approach not only improves the performance of the backbones but also makes them more robust in the out-of-domain test 1.