A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the remaining challenges. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or as a means to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the performance, robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the computational linguistics community.

该研究是一项针对自然语言处理中的因果关系研究，旨在提供因果推理与语言处理的交叉研究概述，并介绍了文本统计学方面的挑战和机遇，以及如何利用因果推理来提高NLP模型的健壮性，公平性和可解释性。

自然语言处理中的因果推断：估计、预测、解释及其它