Papers › SelfExplain: A Self-Explaining Architecture for Neural Text Classifiers

SelfExplain: A Self-Explaining Architecture for Neural Text Classifiers

23 Mar 2021EMNLP 2021 11arXiv:2103.12279archive 2025-07-28

Dheeraj Rajagopal, Vidhisha Balachandran, Eduard Hovy, Yulia Tsvetkov

We introduce SelfExplain, a novel self-explaining model that explains a text classifier's predictions using phrase-based concepts. SelfExplain augments existing neural classifiers by adding (1) a globally interpretable layer that identifies the most influential concepts in the training set for a given sample and (2) a locally interpretable layer that quantifies the contribution of each local input concept by computing a relevance score relative to the predicted label. Experiments across five text-classification datasets show that SelfExplain facilitates interpretability without sacrificing performance. Most importantly, explanations from SelfExplain show sufficiency for model predictions and are perceived as adequate, trustworthy and understandable by human judges compared to existing widely-used baselines.

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dheerajrajagopal/SelfExplain officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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Text Classificationtext-classification

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