Interpretation of Black Box NLP Models: A Survey
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Abstract (arXiv)
An increasing number of machine learning models have been deployed in domains with high stakes such as finance and healthcare. Despite their superior performances, many models are black boxes in nature which are hard to explain. There are growing efforts for researchers to develop methods to interpret these black-box models. Post hoc explanations based on perturbations, such as LIME, are widely used approaches to interpret a machine learning model after it has been built. This class of methods has been shown to exhibit large instability, posing serious challenges to the effectiveness of the method itself and harming user trust. In this paper, we propose S-LIME, which utilizes a hypothesis testing framework based on central limit theorem for determining the number of perturbation points needed to guarantee stability of the resulting explanation. Experiments on both simulated and real world data sets are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 85 of its 128 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2022.
Builds on
85 of 128 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 2; 2026: 2.
9 papers.
- 2023Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Modelscited by 50
- 2022LM-Debugger: An Interactive Tool for Inspection and Intervention in Transformer-Based Language Modelscited by 28
- 2024On Behalf of the Stakeholders: Trends in NLP Model Interpretability in the Era of LLMscited by 25
- 2025Representation Engineering for Large-Language Models: Survey and Research Challengescited by 21
- 2026Interactive Narrative Analytics: Bridging Computational Narrative Extraction and Human Sensemakingcited by 4
- 2024The Role of Syntactic Span Preferences in Post-Hoc Explanation Disagreementcited by 3
- 2024Local Explanations and Self-Explanations for Assessing Faithfulness in black-box LLMscited by 2
- 2025Which Words Matter Most in Zero-Shot Prompts?cited by 2
- 2026Cross-Modal Rationale Transfer for Explainable Humanitarian Classification on Social Mediacited by 0
- 2026Cross-Modal Rationale Transfer for Explainable Humanitarian Classification on Social Media19 Mar 2026
- 2026Interactive Narrative Analytics: Bridging Computational Narrative Extraction and Human Sensemaking16 Jan 2026
- 2025Representation Engineering for Large-Language Models: Survey and Research Challenges24 Feb 2025
- 2025Which Words Matter Most in Zero-Shot Prompts?5 Feb 2025
- 2024Local Explanations and Self-Explanations for Assessing Faithfulness in black-box LLMs18 Sep 2024
- 2024On Behalf of the Stakeholders: Trends in NLP Model Interpretability in the Era of LLMs27 Jul 2024
- 2024The Role of Syntactic Span Preferences in Post-Hoc Explanation Disagreement28 Mar 2024
- 2023Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models19 May 2023
- 2022LM-Debugger: An Interactive Tool for Inspection and Intervention in Transformer-Based Language Models26 Apr 2022