The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) Generate Your Counterfactuals: Towards Controlled Counterfactual Generation for Text Nishtha Madaan, Inkit Padhi, Naveen Panwar, Diptikalyan Saha 1IBM Research AI fnishthamadaan, naveen.panwar,
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract diversity will ensure high coverage of the input space de- fined by the goal. In this paper, we aim to generate such Machine Learning has seen tremendous growth recently, counterfactual text samples which are also effective in find- which has led to a larger adoption of ML systems for ed- ing test-failures (i.e. label flips for NLP classifiers). ucational assessments, credit risk, healthcare, employment, criminal justice, to name a few. Trustworthiness of ML and Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in the work NLP systems is a crucial aspect and requires guarantee that on fairness testing (Ma, Wang, and Liu 2020; Holstein et al. the decisions they make are fair and robust. Aligned with 2019) which are capable of generating a large number of this, we propose a framework GYC, to generate a set of coun- test-cases that capture the model’s ability to misclassify or terfactual text samples, which are crucial for testing these remove unwanted bias around specific protected attributes ML systems. Our main contributions include a) We introduce (Huang et al. 2019), (Garg et al. 2019). This is not only lim- GYC, a framework to generate counterfactual samples such ited to fairness but the community has seen great interest that the generation is plausible, diverse, goal-oriented and ef- in building robust models susceptible to adversarial changes fective, b) We generate counterfactual samples, that can direct (Goodfellow, Shlens, and Szegedy 2014; Michel et al.