Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster
in
Workshop: Socially Responsible Machine Learning

Rationale-Inspired Natural Language Explanations with Commonsense

Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder · Oana-Maria Camburu · Thomas Lukasiewicz · Julian McAuley


Abstract:

Models that generate extractive rationales (ERs) (i.e., subsets of features) or natural language explanations (NLEs) for their predictions are important for explainable AI. While an ER provides a quick view of the features most responsible for a prediction, an NLE allows for a comprehensive description of the decision-making process behind a prediction. However, current models that generate the best ERs or NLEs often fall behind the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in terms of task performance. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing RExC, a self-rationalizing framework that grounds its predictions and two complementary types of explanations (NLEs and ERs) in background knowledge. RExC improves over previous methods by: (i) reaching SOTA task performance while also providing explanations, (ii) providing two types of explanations while existing models usually provide only one, and (iii) beating by a large margin the previous SOTA in terms of quality of explanations. Furthermore, a perturbation analysis in RExC shows a high degree of association between explanations and predictions, a necessary property of faithful explanations.

Chat is not available.