# A Framework for Rationale Extraction for Deep QA models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.04620 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04620/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04683/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07328/) (2017)
- [Is Attention Interpretable?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03731/) (2019)
- [Rationalizing Neural Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04155/) (2016)
- [Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01603/) (2016)
- [Understanding Neural Networks through Representation Erasure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08220/) (2016)
- [QANet: Combining Local Convolution with Global Self-Attention for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09541/) (2018)
- [Explaining Recurrent Neural Network Predictions in Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07206/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Coattention Networks For Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01604/) (2016)
- [What does BERT Learn from Multiple-Choice Reading Comprehension Datasets?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12391/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As neural-network-based QA models become deeper and more complex, there is a demand for robust frameworks which can access a model's rationale for its prediction. Current techniques that provide insights on a model's working are either dependent on adversarial datasets or are proposing models with explicit explanation generation components. These techniques are time-consuming and challenging to extend to existing models and new datasets. In this work, we use `Integrated Gradients' to extract rationale for existing state-of-the-art models in the task of Reading Comprehension based Question Answering (RCQA). On detailed analysis and comparison with collected human rationales, we find that though ~40-80% words of extracted rationale coincide with the human rationale (precision), only 6-19% of human rationale is present in the extracted rationale (recall).
