@inproceedings{avitan-etal-2025-practical,
    title = "A Practical Method for Generating String Counterfactuals",
    author = "Avitan, Matan  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Goldberg, Yoav  and
      Ravfogel, Shauli",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.findings-naacl.180/",
    pages = "3267--3286",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7",
    abstract = "Interventions targeting the representation space of language models (LMs) have emerged as an effective means to influence model behavior. Such methods are employed, for example, to eliminate or alter the encoding of demographic information such as gender within the model`s representations and, in so doing, create a counterfactual representation. However, because the intervention operates within the representation space, understanding precisely what aspects of the text it modifies poses a challenge. In this paper, we give a method to convert representation counterfactuals into string counterfactuals. We demonstrate that this approach enables us to analyze the linguistic alterations corresponding to a given representation space intervention and to interpret the features utilized to encode a specific concept. Moreover, the resulting counterfactuals can be used to mitigate bias in classification through data augmentation."
}