Visualizing and Understanding Neural Models in NLP

Abstract

While neural networks have been successfully applied to many NLP tasks the resulting vectorbased models are very difficult to interpret. For example it's not clear how they achieve compositionality, building sentence meaning from the meanings of words and phrases. In this paper we describe strategies for visualizing compositionality in neural models for NLP, inspired by similar work in computer vision. We first plot unit values to visualize compositionality of negation, intensification, and concessive clauses, allowing us to see wellknown markedness asymmetries in negation. We then introduce methods for visualizing a unit's salience, the amount that it contributes to the final composed meaning from first-order derivatives. Our general-purpose methods may have wide applications for understanding compositionality and other semantic properties of deep networks.