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One of the central goals of causal machine learning is the accurate estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects from observational data. In recent years, meta-learning has emerged as a flexible, model-agnostic paradigm for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) using any supervised model. This paper examines the performance of meta-learners when the confounding variables are embedded in text. Through synthetic data experiments, we show that learners using pre-trained text representations of confounders, in addition to tabular background variables, achieve improved CATE estimates compare to those relying solely on the tabular variables, particularly when sufficient data is available. However, due to the entangled nature of the text embeddings, these models do not fully match the performance of meta-learners with perfect confounder knowledge. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of pre-trained text representations for causal inference and open up interesting avenues for future research.

We present the SynSUM benchmark, a synthetic dataset linking unstructured clinical notes to structured background variables. The dataset consists of 10,000 artificial patient records containing tabular variables (like symptoms, diagnoses and underlying conditions) and related notes describing the fictional patient encounter in the domain of respiratory diseases. The tabular portion of the data is generated through a Bayesian network, where both the causal structure between the variables and the conditional probabilities are proposed by an expert based on domain knowledge. We then prompt a large language model (GPT-4o) to generate a clinical note related to this patient encounter, describing the patient symptoms and additional context. The SynSUM dataset is primarily designed to facilitate research on clinical information extraction in the presence of tabular background variables, which can be linked through domain knowledge to concepts of interest to be extracted from the text - the symptoms, in the case of SynSUM. Secondary uses include research on the automation of clinical reasoning over both tabular data and text, causal effect estimation in the presence of tabular and/or textual confounders, and multi-modal synthetic data generation. The dataset can be downloaded from https://github.com/prabaey/SynSUM.

In this paper, we present ECL, a novel multi-modal dataset containing the textual and numerical data from corporate 10K filings and associated binary bankruptcy labels. Furthermore, we develop and critically evaluate several classical and neural bankruptcy prediction models using this dataset. Our findings suggest that the information contained in each data modality is complementary for bankruptcy prediction. We also see that the binary bankruptcy prediction target does not enable our models to distinguish next year bankruptcy from an unhealthy financial situation resulting in bankruptcy in later years. Finally, we explore the use of LLMs in the context of our task. We show how GPT-based models can be used to extract meaningful summaries from the textual data but zero-shot bankruptcy prediction results are poor. All resources required to access and update the dataset or replicate our experiments are available on github.com/henriarnoUG/ECL., Comment: Presented at the 6th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP) @ IJCNLP-AACL 2023 in Bali, Indonesia

Models for bankruptcy prediction are useful in several real-world scenarios, and multiple research contributions have been devoted to the task, based on structured (numerical) as well as unstructured (textual) data. However, the lack of a common benchmark dataset and evaluation strategy impedes the objective comparison between models. This paper introduces such a benchmark for the unstructured data scenario, based on novel and established datasets, in order to stimulate further research into the task. We describe and evaluate several classical and neural baseline models, and discuss benefits and flaws of different strategies. In particular, we find that a lightweight bag-of-words model based on static in-domain word representations obtains surprisingly good results, especially when taking textual data from several years into account. These results are critically assessed, and discussed in light of particular aspects of the data and the task. All code to replicate the data and experimental results will be released., Comment: Presented at the 4th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP) @ IJCAI-ECAI 2022 in Vienna, Austria