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Poster
A Game Theoretic Approach to Class-wise Selective Rationalization
Shiyu Chang · Yang Zhang · Mo Yu · Tommi Jaakkola

Tue Dec 10 10:45 AM -- 12:45 PM (PST) @ East Exhibition Hall B + C #1
in Algorithms -- Adversarial Learning »

Selection of input features such as relevant pieces of text has become a common technique of highlighting how complex neural predictors operate. The selection can be optimized post-hoc for trained models or incorporated directly into the method itself (self-explaining). However, an overall selection does not properly capture the multi-faceted nature of useful rationales such as pros and cons for decisions. To this end, we propose a new game theoretic approach to class-dependent rationalization, where the method is specifically trained to highlight evidence supporting alternative conclusions. Each class involves three players set up competitively to find evidence for factual and counterfactual scenarios. We show theoretically in a simplified scenario how the game drives the solution towards meaningful class-dependent rationales. We evaluate the method in single- and multi-aspect sentiment classification tasks and demonstrate that the proposed method is able to identify both factual (justifying the ground truth label) and counterfactual (countering the ground truth label) rationales consistent with human rationalization. The code for our method is publicly available.

Keywords: Natural Language Processing · Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · Applications · Algorithms -> Adversarial Learning; Applications

Author Information

Shiyu Chang (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Yang Zhang (MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab)
Mo Yu (IBM Research)
Tommi Jaakkola (MIT)

Tommi Jaakkola is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He received an M.Sc. degree in theoretical physics from Helsinki University of Technology, and Ph.D. from MIT in computational neuroscience. Following a Sloan postdoctoral fellowship in computational molecular biology, he joined the MIT faculty in 1998. His research interests include statistical inference, graphical models, and large scale modern estimation problems with predominantly incomplete data.

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