2023/10/30 by Josh Magnus Ludan, Ludan, Josh Magnus, Qing Lyu +9 · 8 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.19660
openalex publication_date 2023/10/30 · openalex created_date 2023/11/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Black-box deep neural networks excel in text classification, yet their application in high-stakes domains is hindered by their lack of interpretability. To address this, we propose Text Bottleneck Models (TBM), an intrinsically interpretable text classification framework that offers both global and local explanations. Rather than directly predicting the output label, TBM predicts categorical values for a sparse set of salient concepts and uses a linear layer over those concept values to produce the final prediction. These concepts can be automatically discovered and measured by a Large Language Model (LLM) without the need for human curation. Experiments on 12 diverse text understanding datasets demonstrate that TBM can rival the performance of black-box baselines such as few-shot GPT-4 and finetuned DeBERTa while falling short against finetuned GPT-3.5. Comprehensive human evaluation validates that TBM can generate high-quality concepts relevant to the task, and the concept measurement aligns well with human judgments, suggesting that the predictions made by TBMs are interpretable. Overall, our findings suggest that TBM is a promising new framework that enhances interpretability with minimal performance tradeoffs.