A Causal Approach for Counterfactual Reasoning in Narratives

Counterfactual reasoning in narratives requires predicting how alternative conditions, contrary to what actually happened, might have resulted in different outcomes. One major challenge is to maintain the causality between the counterfactual condition and the generated counterfactual outcome. In this paper, we propose a basic VAE module for counterfactual reasoning in narratives. We further introduce a pre-trained classifier and external event commonsense to mitigate the posterior collapse problem in the VAE approach, and improve the causality between the counterfactual condition and the generated counterfactual outcome. We evaluate our method on two public benchmarks. Experiments show that our method is effective. Code is available at https://github.com/mufeiteng/CausalCRN.