Exploring Interpretability in Event Extraction: Multitask Learning of a Neural Event Classifier and an Explanation Decoder

Zheng Tang, Gus Hahn-Powell, Mihai Surdeanu


Abstract
We propose an interpretable approach for event extraction that mitigates the tension between generalization and interpretability by jointly training for the two goals. Our approach uses an encoder-decoder architecture, which jointly trains a classifier for event extraction, and a rule decoder that generates syntactico-semantic rules that explain the decisions of the event classifier. We evaluate the proposed approach on three biomedical events and show that the decoder generates interpretable rules that serve as accurate explanations for the event classifier’s decisions, and, importantly, that the joint training generally improves the performance of the event classifier. Lastly, we show that our approach can be used for semi-supervised learning, and that its performance improves when trained on automatically-labeled data generated by a rule-based system.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-srw.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Shruti Rijhwani, Jiangming Liu, Yizhong Wang, Rotem Dror
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
169–175
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-srw.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-srw.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zheng Tang, Gus Hahn-Powell, and Mihai Surdeanu. 2020. Exploring Interpretability in Event Extraction: Multitask Learning of a Neural Event Classifier and an Explanation Decoder. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 169–175, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Interpretability in Event Extraction: Multitask Learning of a Neural Event Classifier and an Explanation Decoder (Tang et al., ACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-srw.23.pdf
Software:
 2020.acl-srw.23.Software.zip
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928646