E-VarM: Enhanced Variational Word Masks to Improve the Interpretability of Text Classification Models
Ling Ge, ChunMing Hu, Guanghui Ma, Junshuang Wu, Junfan Chen, JiHong Liu, Hong Zhang, Wenyi Qin
Abstract
Enhancing the interpretability of text classification models can help increase the reliability of these models in real-world applications. Currently, most researchers focus on extracting task-specific words from inputs to improve the interpretability of the model. The competitive approaches exploit the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to improve the performance of word masking at the word embedding layer to obtain task-specific words. However, these approaches ignore the multi-level semantics of the text, which can impair the interpretability of the model, and do not consider the risk of representation overlap caused by the VIB, which can impair the classification performance. In this paper, we propose an enhanced variational word masks approach, named E-VarM, to solve these two issues effectively. The E-VarM combines multi-level semantics from all hidden layers of the model to mask out task-irrelevant words and uses contrastive learning to readjust the distances between representations. Empirical studies on ten benchmark text classification datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the SOTA methods in simultaneously improving the interpretability and accuracy of the model.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ge-etal-2022-e,
title = "{E}-{V}ar{M}: Enhanced Variational Word Masks to Improve the Interpretability of Text Classification Models",
author = "Ge, Ling and
Hu, ChunMing and
Ma, Guanghui and
Wu, Junshuang and
Chen, Junfan and
Liu, JiHong and
Zhang, Hong and
Qin, Wenyi and
Zhang, Richong",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Huang, Chu-Ren and
Kim, Hansaem and
Pustejovsky, James and
Wanner, Leo and
Choi, Key-Sun and
Ryu, Pum-Mo and
Chen, Hsin-Hsi and
Donatelli, Lucia and
Ji, Heng and
Kurohashi, Sadao and
Paggio, Patrizia and
Xue, Nianwen and
Kim, Seokhwan and
Hahm, Younggyun and
He, Zhong and
Lee, Tony Kyungil and
Santus, Enrico and
Bond, Francis and
Na, Seung-Hoon",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = oct,
year = "2022",
address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.87/",
pages = "1036--1050"
}