{"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/understanding-attention-in-machine-reading","title":"Multilingual Multi-Aspect Explainability Analyses on Machine Reading Comprehension Models","arxiv_id":"2108.11574","date":"2021-08-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yiming Cui","Wei-Nan Zhang","Wanxiang Che","Ting Liu","Zhigang Chen","Shijin Wang"],"abstract":"Achieving human-level performance on some of the Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) datasets is no longer challenging with the help of powerful Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, the internal mechanism of these artifacts remains unclear, placing an obstacle for further understanding these models. This paper focuses on conducting a series of analytical experiments to examine the relations between the multi-head self-attention and the final MRC system performance, revealing the potential explainability in PLM-based MRC models. To ensure the robustness of the analyses, we perform our experiments in a multilingual way on top of various PLMs. We discover that passage-to-question and passage understanding attentions are the most important ones in the question answering process, showing strong correlations to the final performance than other parts. Through comprehensive visualizations and case studies, we also observe several general findings on the attention maps, which can be helpful to understand how these models solve the questions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.11574v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.11574v3.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":"understanding-attention-in-machine-reading","repo_url":"https://github.com/ymcui/mrc-model-analysis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-reading-comprehension","task_name":"Machine Reading Comprehension"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"reading-comprehension","task_name":"Reading Comprehension"},{"task_slug":"span-extraction-mrc","task_name":"Span-Extraction MRC"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"albert","method_name":"ALBERT"},{"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":"electra","method_name":"ELECTRA"},{"method_slug":"lamb","method_name":"LAMB"},{"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=2108.11574","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}