Explainability to Business: Demystify Transformer Models with Attention-based Explanations

Abstract

Recently, many companies are relying on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to understand the text data generated daily. It has become very critical to deal with this data because finding the sentiments of text and summarizing them will help the company understand the pain points of the customers posting reviews on social media or understand the experience of the customer. These requirements have increasingly demanded many advanced algorithms to deal the text data. The introduction of Transformers led to businesses adopting NLP methods more and more to keep up with their needs. Models like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), state-of-the-art results were achieved with billions of parameters learned. Although these advancements improved the accuracy and expanded the use of algorithms to a wide range of NLP tasks like language translation, text summarization, and language modeling. Businesses are more interested in the Explainability of the model compared to its accuracy. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays an important role to comprehend the complexities of the model as well as the influence of weights on predictions. In this paper, the complexities of the transformer model are unraveled by presenting a straightforward method for computing explainable predictions. The DistilBERT model is chosen as an example to implement the explainable system due to its lighter nature. Combining the strengths of a Posthoc expla-nation with those of a self-learning neural network, the method makes it simple to scale it to other algorithms to implement. With technologies like python, PyTorch, and Hugging Face, a detailed step-by-step algorithmic computation is demonstrated to explain the predictions from the attention-based explanations.