{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-explaining-your-explanations-of-bert-an","title":"On Explaining Your Explanations of BERT: An Empirical Study with Sequence Classification","arxiv_id":"2101.00196","date":"2021-01-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhengxuan Wu","Desmond C. Ong"],"abstract":"BERT, as one of the pretrianed language models, attracts the most attention in recent years for creating new benchmarks across GLUE tasks via fine-tuning. One pressing issue is to open up the blackbox and explain the decision makings of BERT. A number of attribution techniques have been proposed to explain BERT models, but are often limited to sequence to sequence tasks. In this paper, we adapt existing attribution methods on explaining decision makings of BERT in sequence classification tasks. We conduct extensive analyses of four existing attribution methods by applying them to four different datasets in sentiment analysis. We compare the reliability and robustness of each method via various ablation studies. Furthermore, we test whether attribution methods explain generalized semantics across semantically similar tasks. Our work provides solid guidance for using attribution methods to explain decision makings of BERT for downstream classification tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00196v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00196v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-explaining-your-explanations-of-bert-an","repo_url":"https://github.com/frankaging/BERT_LRP","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"on-explaining-your-explanations-of-bert-an","repo_url":"https://github.com/frankaging/bert-lrp","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification","task_name":"General Classification"},{"task_slug":"sentiment-analysis","task_name":"Sentiment Analysis"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2101.00196","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}