Faithfulness Tests for Natural Language Explanations

Pepa Atanasova, Oana-Maria Camburu, Christina Lioma, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Jakob Grue Simonsen, Isabelle Augenstein

Main: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP Main-oral Paper

Session 3: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP (Oral)
Conference Room: Metropolitan East
Conference Time: July 11, 09:00-10:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 3 (13:00-14:30 UTC)
Keywords: free-text/natural language explanations
TLDR: Explanations of neural models aim to reveal a model's decision-making process for its predictions. However, recent work shows that current methods giving explanations such as saliency maps or counterfactuals can be misleading, as they are prone to present reasons that are unfaithful to the model's i...
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Abstract: Explanations of neural models aim to reveal a model's decision-making process for its predictions. However, recent work shows that current methods giving explanations such as saliency maps or counterfactuals can be misleading, as they are prone to present reasons that are unfaithful to the model's inner workings. This work explores the challenging question of evaluating the faithfulness of natural language explanations (NLEs). To this end, we present two tests. First, we propose a counterfactual input editor for inserting reasons that lead to counterfactual predictions but are not reflected by the NLEs. Second, we reconstruct inputs from the reasons stated in the generated NLEs and check how often they lead to the same predictions. Our tests can evaluate emerging NLE models, proving a fundamental tool in the development of faithful NLEs.