4,098 research outputs found
Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP: A Report on the First BlackboxNLP Workshop
The EMNLP 2018 workshop BlackboxNLP was dedicated to resources and techniques
specifically developed for analyzing and understanding the inner-workings and
representations acquired by neural models of language. Approaches included:
systematic manipulation of input to neural networks and investigating the
impact on their performance, testing whether interpretable knowledge can be
decoded from intermediate representations acquired by neural networks,
proposing modifications to neural network architectures to make their knowledge
state or generated output more explainable, and examining the performance of
networks on simplified or formal languages. Here we review a number of
representative studies in each category
Sparse Overcomplete Word Vector Representations
Current distributed representations of words show little resemblance to
theories of lexical semantics. The former are dense and uninterpretable, the
latter largely based on familiar, discrete classes (e.g., supersenses) and
relations (e.g., synonymy and hypernymy). We propose methods that transform
word vectors into sparse (and optionally binary) vectors. The resulting
representations are more similar to the interpretable features typically used
in NLP, though they are discovered automatically from raw corpora. Because the
vectors are highly sparse, they are computationally easy to work with. Most
importantly, we find that they outperform the original vectors on benchmark
tasks.Comment: Proceedings of ACL 201
Pathologies of Neural Models Make Interpretations Difficult
One way to interpret neural model predictions is to highlight the most
important input features---for example, a heatmap visualization over the words
in an input sentence. In existing interpretation methods for NLP, a word's
importance is determined by either input perturbation---measuring the decrease
in model confidence when that word is removed---or by the gradient with respect
to that word. To understand the limitations of these methods, we use input
reduction, which iteratively removes the least important word from the input.
This exposes pathological behaviors of neural models: the remaining words
appear nonsensical to humans and are not the ones determined as important by
interpretation methods. As we confirm with human experiments, the reduced
examples lack information to support the prediction of any label, but models
still make the same predictions with high confidence. To explain these
counterintuitive results, we draw connections to adversarial examples and
confidence calibration: pathological behaviors reveal difficulties in
interpreting neural models trained with maximum likelihood. To mitigate their
deficiencies, we fine-tune the models by encouraging high entropy outputs on
reduced examples. Fine-tuned models become more interpretable under input
reduction without accuracy loss on regular examples.Comment: EMNLP 2018 camera read
Classification of Radiology Reports Using Neural Attention Models
The electronic health record (EHR) contains a large amount of
multi-dimensional and unstructured clinical data of significant operational and
research value. Distinguished from previous studies, our approach embraces a
double-annotated dataset and strays away from obscure "black-box" models to
comprehensive deep learning models. In this paper, we present a novel neural
attention mechanism that not only classifies clinically important findings.
Specifically, convolutional neural networks (CNN) with attention analysis are
used to classify radiology head computed tomography reports based on five
categories that radiologists would account for in assessing acute and
communicable findings in daily practice. The experiments show that our CNN
attention models outperform non-neural models, especially when trained on a
larger dataset. Our attention analysis demonstrates the intuition behind the
classifier's decision by generating a heatmap that highlights attended terms
used by the CNN model; this is valuable when potential downstream medical
decisions are to be performed by human experts or the classifier information is
to be used in cohort construction such as for epidemiological studies
CausaLM: Causal Model Explanation Through Counterfactual Language Models
Understanding predictions made by deep neural networks is notoriously
difficult, but also crucial to their dissemination. As all ML-based methods,
they are as good as their training data, and can also capture unwanted biases.
While there are tools that can help understand whether such biases exist, they
do not distinguish between correlation and causation, and might be ill-suited
for text-based models and for reasoning about high level language concepts. A
key problem of estimating the causal effect of a concept of interest on a given
model is that this estimation requires the generation of counterfactual
examples, which is challenging with existing generation technology. To bridge
that gap, we propose CausaLM, a framework for producing causal model
explanations using counterfactual language representation models. Our approach
is based on fine-tuning of deep contextualized embedding models with auxiliary
adversarial tasks derived from the causal graph of the problem. Concretely, we
show that by carefully choosing auxiliary adversarial pre-training tasks,
language representation models such as BERT can effectively learn a
counterfactual representation for a given concept of interest, and be used to
estimate its true causal effect on model performance. A byproduct of our method
is a language representation model that is unaffected by the tested concept,
which can be useful in mitigating unwanted bias ingrained in the data.Comment: Our code and data are available at:
https://amirfeder.github.io/CausaLM/ Under review for the Computational
Linguistics journa
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