English

Explaining Recurrent Neural Network Predictions in Sentiment Analysis

Computation and Language 2017-08-08 v2 Artificial Intelligence Neural and Evolutionary Computing Machine Learning

Abstract

Recently, a technique called Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) was shown to deliver insightful explanations in the form of input space relevances for understanding feed-forward neural network classification decisions. In the present work, we extend the usage of LRP to recurrent neural networks. We propose a specific propagation rule applicable to multiplicative connections as they arise in recurrent network architectures such as LSTMs and GRUs. We apply our technique to a word-based bi-directional LSTM model on a five-class sentiment prediction task, and evaluate the resulting LRP relevances both qualitatively and quantitatively, obtaining better results than a gradient-based related method which was used in previous work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.07206,
  title  = {Explaining Recurrent Neural Network Predictions in Sentiment Analysis},
  author = {Leila Arras and Grégoire Montavon and Klaus-Robert Müller and Wojciech Samek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07206},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

9 pages, 4 figures, accepted for EMNLP'17 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis (WASSA)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:26:17.101Z