Wen-li Wang
2026
Text Embedding as Treatment: A Meta Causal Approach for Robust Sentiment Classification
Fengxiang Cheng | Chuan Zhou | Xiang Li | Haoxuan Li | Wen-li Wang | Jinkun Chen | Mingming Gong | Kun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Fengxiang Cheng | Chuan Zhou | Xiang Li | Haoxuan Li | Wen-li Wang | Jinkun Chen | Mingming Gong | Kun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Sentiment classification is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP). To mitigate the spurious correlation, the causal word identification method estimates the impact of treatment words on sentence sentiment and removes those with low treatment effects. However, previous works regard the presence or absence of a specific word in a sentence as a binary treatment. This approach limits the generalizability to novel words and the robustness of low-frequency words. To bridge this gap, we propose a meta-causal approach that achieves causal word identification for arbitrary words with a single training task. Specifically, we begin by clustering contexts based on their embeddings obtained from a pre-trained language model. Subsequently, for each cluster, a representation and multi-head prediction networks are trained to estimate the treatment effect of each word to distinguish causally related words from spuriously correlated ones. The trained word classifier is then used to give weights for different words to train a more robust and generalizable sentiment classification model. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in identifying causal words and improving the performance of sentiment classification.