@inproceedings{wu-etal-2020-structured,
title = "Structured Self-{A}ttention{W}eights Encode Semantics in Sentiment Analysis",
author = "Wu, Zhengxuan and
Nguyen, Thanh-Son and
Ong, Desmond",
editor = "Alishahi, Afra and
Belinkov, Yonatan and
Chrupa{\l}a, Grzegorz and
Hupkes, Dieuwke and
Pinter, Yuval and
Sajjad, Hassan",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP",
month = nov,
year = "2020",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24",
pages = "255--264",
abstract = "Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer encodes syntactic information; Here, we show that self-attention scores encode semantics by considering sentiment analysis tasks. In contrast to gradient-based feature attribution methods, we propose a simple and effective Layer-wise Attention Tracing (LAT) method to analyze structured attention weights. We apply our method to Transformer models trained on two tasks that have surface dissimilarities, but share common semantics{---}sentiment analysis of movie reviews and time-series valence prediction in life story narratives. Across both tasks, words with high aggregated attention weights were rich in emotional semantics, as quantitatively validated by an emotion lexicon labeled by human annotators. Our results show that structured attention weights encode rich semantics in sentiment analysis, and match human interpretations of semantics.",
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="wu-etal-2020-structured">
<titleInfo>
<title>Structured Self-AttentionWeights Encode Semantics in Sentiment Analysis</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zhengxuan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Wu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Thanh-Son</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Nguyen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ong</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2020-11</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the Third BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Afra</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Alishahi</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yonatan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Belinkov</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Grzegorz</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chrupała</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Dieuwke</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Hupkes</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yuval</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pinter</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hassan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Sajjad</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Online</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer encodes syntactic information; Here, we show that self-attention scores encode semantics by considering sentiment analysis tasks. In contrast to gradient-based feature attribution methods, we propose a simple and effective Layer-wise Attention Tracing (LAT) method to analyze structured attention weights. We apply our method to Transformer models trained on two tasks that have surface dissimilarities, but share common semantics—sentiment analysis of movie reviews and time-series valence prediction in life story narratives. Across both tasks, words with high aggregated attention weights were rich in emotional semantics, as quantitatively validated by an emotion lexicon labeled by human annotators. Our results show that structured attention weights encode rich semantics in sentiment analysis, and match human interpretations of semantics.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">wu-etal-2020-structured</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2020-11</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>255</start>
<end>264</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Structured Self-AttentionWeights Encode Semantics in Sentiment Analysis
%A Wu, Zhengxuan
%A Nguyen, Thanh-Son
%A Ong, Desmond
%Y Alishahi, Afra
%Y Belinkov, Yonatan
%Y Chrupała, Grzegorz
%Y Hupkes, Dieuwke
%Y Pinter, Yuval
%Y Sajjad, Hassan
%S Proceedings of the Third BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
%D 2020
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F wu-etal-2020-structured
%X Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer encodes syntactic information; Here, we show that self-attention scores encode semantics by considering sentiment analysis tasks. In contrast to gradient-based feature attribution methods, we propose a simple and effective Layer-wise Attention Tracing (LAT) method to analyze structured attention weights. We apply our method to Transformer models trained on two tasks that have surface dissimilarities, but share common semantics—sentiment analysis of movie reviews and time-series valence prediction in life story narratives. Across both tasks, words with high aggregated attention weights were rich in emotional semantics, as quantitatively validated by an emotion lexicon labeled by human annotators. Our results show that structured attention weights encode rich semantics in sentiment analysis, and match human interpretations of semantics.
%R 10.18653/v1/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24
%U https://aclanthology.org/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24
%P 255-264
Markdown (Informal)
[Structured Self-AttentionWeights Encode Semantics in Sentiment Analysis](https://aclanthology.org/2020.blackboxnlp-1.24) (Wu et al., BlackboxNLP 2020)
ACL