Explaining Recurrent Neural Network Predictions in Sentiment Analysis

Understand

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.