Pith. sign in

REVIEW 1 cited by

Staying True to Your Word: (How) Can Attention Become Explanation?

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2005.09379 v1 pith:GIO4PDOY submitted 2020-05-19 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords attentionbecomeexplanationmodelsusedbeenmechanismrecurrent
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

The attention mechanism has quickly become ubiquitous in NLP. In addition to improving performance of models, attention has been widely used as a glimpse into the inner workings of NLP models. The latter aspect has in the recent years become a common topic of discussion, most notably in work of Jain and Wallace, 2019; Wiegreffe and Pinter, 2019. With the shortcomings of using attention weights as a tool of transparency revealed, the attention mechanism has been stuck in a limbo without concrete proof when and whether it can be used as an explanation. In this paper, we provide an explanation as to why attention has seen rightful critique when used with recurrent networks in sequence classification tasks. We propose a remedy to these issues in the form of a word level objective and our findings give credibility for attention to provide faithful interpretations of recurrent models.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. A Preliminary Study on Explaining Risk of Code Changes using LLM-Based Prediction Models

    cs.SE 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Top-2 attention-highlighted hunks cover expert-labeled outage root causes 53.85% of the time while requiring review of 26.28% of changed lines.

Pith tools