Thermostat: A Large Collection of NLP Model Explanations and Analysis Tools

Nils Feldhus, Robert Schwarzenberg, Sebastian Möller


Abstract
In the language domain, as in other domains, neural explainability takes an ever more important role, with feature attribution methods on the forefront. Many such methods require considerable computational resources and expert knowledge about implementation details and parameter choices. To facilitate research, we present Thermostat which consists of a large collection of model explanations and accompanying analysis tools. Thermostat allows easy access to over 200k explanations for the decisions of prominent state-of-the-art models spanning across different NLP tasks, generated with multiple explainers. The dataset took over 10k GPU hours (> one year) to compile; compute time that the community now saves. The accompanying software tools allow to analyse explanations instance-wise but also accumulatively on corpus level. Users can investigate and compare models, datasets and explainers without the need to orchestrate implementation details. Thermostat is fully open source, democratizes explainability research in the language domain, circumvents redundant computations and increases comparability and replicability.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-demo.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Heike Adel, Shuming Shi
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
87–95
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nils Feldhus, Robert Schwarzenberg, and Sebastian Möller. 2021. Thermostat: A Large Collection of NLP Model Explanations and Analysis Tools. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 87–95, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Thermostat: A Large Collection of NLP Model Explanations and Analysis Tools (Feldhus et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.11.pdf
Software:
 2021.emnlp-demo.11.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.11.mp4
Code
 dfki-nlp/thermostat +  additional community code
Data
AG NewsIMDb Movie ReviewsMultiNLIXNLI