@inproceedings{kamp-etal-2024-role,
    title = "The Role of Syntactic Span Preferences in Post-Hoc Explanation Disagreement",
    author = "Kamp, Jonathan  and
      Beinborn, Lisa  and
      Fokkens, Antske",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1397",
    pages = "16066--16078",
    abstract = "Post-hoc explanation methods are an important tool for increasing model transparency for users. Unfortunately, the currently used methods for attributing token importance often yield diverging patterns. In this work, we study potential sources of disagreement across methods from a linguistic perspective. We find that different methods systematically select different classes of words and that methods that agree most with other methods and with humans display similar linguistic preferences. Token-level differences between methods are smoothed out if we compare them on the syntactic span level. We also find higher agreement across methods by estimating the most important spans dynamically instead of relying on a fixed subset of size k. We systematically investigate the interaction between k and spans and propose an improved configuration for selecting important tokens.",
}

Post-hoc explanation methods are an important tool for increasing model transparency for users. Unfortunately, the currently used methods for attributing token importance often yield diverging patterns. In this work, we study potential sources of disagreement across methods from a linguistic perspective. We find that different methods systematically select different classes of words and that methods that agree most with other methods and with humans display similar linguistic preferences. Token-level differences between methods are smoothed out if we compare them on the syntactic span level. We also find higher agreement across methods by estimating the most important spans dynamically instead of relying on a fixed subset of size k. We systematically investigate the interaction between k and spans and propose an improved configuration for selecting important tokens.
Kamp, Jonathan Beinborn, Lisa Fokkens, Antske
The Role of Syntactic Span Preferences in Post-Hoc Explanation Disagreement