Papers › Towards Hierarchical Importance Attribution: Explaining Compositional Semantics for...
Towards Hierarchical Importance Attribution: Explaining Compositional Semantics for Neural Sequence Models
Xisen Jin, Zhongyu Wei, Junyi Du, xiangyang xue, Xiang Ren
The impressive performance of neural networks on natural language processing tasks attributes to their ability to model complicated word and phrase compositions. To explain how the model handles semantic compositions, we study hierarchical explanation of neural network predictions. We identify non-additivity and context independent importance attributions within hierarchies as two desirable properties for highlighting word and phrase compositions. We show some prior efforts on hierarchical explanations, e.g. contextual decomposition, do not satisfy the desired properties mathematically, leading to inconsistent explanation quality in different models. In this paper, we start by proposing a formal and general way to quantify the importance of each word and phrase. Following the formulation, we propose Sampling and Contextual Decomposition (SCD) algorithm and Sampling and Occlusion (SOC) algorithm. Human and metrics evaluation on both LSTM models and BERT Transformer models on multiple datasets show that our algorithms outperform prior hierarchical explanation algorithms. Our algorithms help to visualize semantic composition captured by models, extract classification rules and improve human trust of models. Project page: https://inklab.usc.edu/hiexpl/
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections