Multitask Learning for Citation Purpose Classification

We present our entry into the 2021 3C Shared Task Citation Context Classification based on Purpose competition. The goal of the competition is to classify a citation in a scientific article based on its purpose. This task is important because it could potentially lead to more comprehensive ways of summarizing the purpose and uses of scientific articles, but it is also difficult, mainly due to the limited amount of available training data in which the purposes of each citation have been hand-labeled, along with the subjectivity of these labels. Our entry in the competition is a multi-task model that combines multiple modules designed to handle the problem from different perspectives, including hand-generated linguistic features, TF-IDF features, and an LSTM-with-attention model. We also provide an ablation study and feature analysis whose insights could lead to future work.

dame-flame: A Python Library Providing Fast Interpretable Matching for Causal Inference

dame-flame is a Python package for performing matching for observational causal inference on datasets containing discrete covariates. This package implements the Dynamic Almost Matching Exactly (DAME) and Fast Large-Scale Almost Matching Exactly (FLAME) algorithms, which match treatment and control units on subsets of the covariates. The resulting matched groups are interpretable, because the matches are made on covariates (rather than, for instance, propensity scores), and high-quality, because machine learning is used to determine which covariates are important to match on. DAME solves an optimization problem that matches units on as many covariates as possible, prioritizing matches on important covariates. FLAME approximates the solution found by DAME via a much faster backward feature selection procedure. The package provides several adjustable parameters to adapt the algorithms to specific applications, and can calculate treatment effects after matching. Descriptions of these parameters, details on estimating treatment effects, and further examples, can be found in the documentation at https://almost-matching-exactly.github.io/DAME-FLAME-Python-Package/