Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Causal Effects of Linguistic Properties   We consider the problem of using observational data to estimate the causal
effects of linguistic properties. For example, does writing a complaint
politely lead to a faster response time? How much will a positive product
review increase sales? This paper addresses two technical challenges related to
the problem before developing a practical method. First, we formalize the
causal quantity of interest as the effect of a writer's intent, and establish
the assumptions necessary to identify this from observational data. Second, in
practice, we only have access to noisy proxies for the linguistic properties of
interest -- e.g., predictions from classifiers and lexicons. We propose an
estimator for this setting and prove that its bias is bounded when we perform
an adjustment for the text. Based on these results, we introduce TextCause, an
algorithm for estimating causal effects of linguistic properties. The method
leverages (1) distant supervision to improve the quality of noisy proxies, and
(2) a pre-trained language model (BERT) to adjust for the text. We show that
the proposed method outperforms related approaches when estimating the effect
of Amazon review sentiment on semi-simulated sales figures. Finally, we present
an applied case study investigating the effects of complaint politeness on
bureaucratic response times.

26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
2
The categories of this paper are: math
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex