AUTHOR=Mendez Guzman Erick , Schlegel Viktor , Batista-Navarro Riza 

TITLE=From outputs to insights: a survey of rationalization approaches for explainable text classification

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1363531

DOI=10.3389/frai.2024.1363531

ISSN=2624-8212

ABSTRACT=Deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance for text classification in the last two decades. However, this has come at the expense of models becoming less understandable, limiting their application scope in high-stakes domains. The increased interest in explainability has resulted in many proposed forms of explanation. Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that rationales, or language explanations, are more intuitive and human-understandable, especially for non-technical stakeholders. This survey provides an overview of the progress the community has achieved thus far in rationalization approaches for text classification. We first describe and compare techniques for producing extractive and abstractive rationales. Next, we present various rationale-annotated data sets that facilitate the training and evaluation of rationalization models. Then, we detail proxy-based and human-grounded metrics to evaluate machine-generated rationales. Finally, we outline current challenges and encourage directions for future work.