AllenNLP Interpret: A Framework for Explaining Predictions of NLP Models

Eric Wallace, Jens Tuyls, Junlin Wang, Sanjay Subramanian, Matt Gardner, Sameer Singh


Abstract
Neural NLP models are increasingly accurate but are imperfect and opaque—they break in counterintuitive ways and leave end users puzzled at their behavior. Model interpretation methods ameliorate this opacity by providing explanations for specific model predictions. Unfortunately, existing interpretation codebases make it difficult to apply these methods to new models and tasks, which hinders adoption for practitioners and burdens interpretability researchers. We introduce AllenNLP Interpret, a flexible framework for interpreting NLP models. The toolkit provides interpretation primitives (e.g., input gradients) for any AllenNLP model and task, a suite of built-in interpretation methods, and a library of front-end visualization components. We demonstrate the toolkit’s flexibility and utility by implementing live demos for five interpretation methods (e.g., saliency maps and adversarial attacks) on a variety of models and tasks (e.g., masked language modeling using BERT and reading comprehension using BiDAF). These demos, alongside our code and tutorials, are available at https://allennlp.org/interpret.
Anthology ID:
D19-3002
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Sebastian Padó, Ruihong Huang
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7–12
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-3002
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-3002
Award:
 Best Demo paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eric Wallace, Jens Tuyls, Junlin Wang, Sanjay Subramanian, Matt Gardner, and Sameer Singh. 2019. AllenNLP Interpret: A Framework for Explaining Predictions of NLP Models. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations, pages 7–12, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AllenNLP Interpret: A Framework for Explaining Predictions of NLP Models (Wallace et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-3002.pdf
Data
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