Explaining Neural Network Predictions on Sentence Pairs via Learning Word-Group Masks

Hanjie Chen, Song Feng, Jatin Ganhotra, Hui Wan, Chulaka Gunasekara, Sachindra Joshi, Yangfeng Ji


Abstract
Explaining neural network models is important for increasing their trustworthiness in real-world applications. Most existing methods generate post-hoc explanations for neural network models by identifying individual feature attributions or detecting interactions between adjacent features. However, for models with text pairs as inputs (e.g., paraphrase identification), existing methods are not sufficient to capture feature interactions between two texts and their simple extension of computing all word-pair interactions between two texts is computationally inefficient. In this work, we propose the Group Mask (GMASK) method to implicitly detect word correlations by grouping correlated words from the input text pair together and measure their contribution to the corresponding NLP tasks as a whole. The proposed method is evaluated with two different model architectures (decomposable attention model and BERT) across four datasets, including natural language inference and paraphrase identification tasks. Experiments show the effectiveness of GMASK in providing faithful explanations to these models.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.306
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3917–3930
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.306
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.306
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanjie Chen, Song Feng, Jatin Ganhotra, Hui Wan, Chulaka Gunasekara, Sachindra Joshi, and Yangfeng Ji. 2021. Explaining Neural Network Predictions on Sentence Pairs via Learning Word-Group Masks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3917–3930, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explaining Neural Network Predictions on Sentence Pairs via Learning Word-Group Masks (Chen et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.306.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.306.mp4
Code
 UVa-NLP/GMASK
Data
GLUEMRPCSNLIe-SNLI