Generalizing to Unseen Disaster Events: A Causal View
Philipp Seeberger, Steffen Freisinger, Tobias Bocklet, Korbinian Riedhammer
Abstract
Due to the rapid growth of social media platforms, these tools have become essential for monitoring information during ongoing disaster events. However, extracting valuable insights requires real-time processing of vast amounts of data. A major challenge in existing systems is their exposure to event-related biases, which negatively affects their ability to generalize to emerging events. While recent advancements in debiasing and causal learning offer promising solutions, they remain underexplored in the disaster event domain. In this work, we approach bias mitigation through a causal lens and propose a method to reduce event- and domain-related biases, enhancing generalization to future events. Our approach outperforms multiple baselines by up to +1.9% F1 and significantly improves a PLM-based classifier across three disaster classification tasks.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.findings-ijcnlp.2
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Mumbai, India
- Editors:
- Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 28–37
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.2/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Philipp Seeberger, Steffen Freisinger, Tobias Bocklet, and Korbinian Riedhammer. 2025. Generalizing to Unseen Disaster Events: A Causal View. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 28–37, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Generalizing to Unseen Disaster Events: A Causal View (Seeberger et al., Findings 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.2.pdf