This directory contains the code and resources of the following paper:

"Rationalizing Neural Predictions". Tao Lei, Regina Barzilay and Tommi Jaakkola. EMNLP 2016. [PDF] [Slides]

The method learns to provide justifications, i.e. rationales, as supporting evidence of neural networks' prediction. The following figure illustrates the rationales and the associated predictions for multi-aspect sentiment analysis on product reivew:

A Pytorch implementation is available: https://github.com/yala/text_nn. This version uses Gumbel softmax instead of REINFORCE for training.

A Tensorflow implementation is available: https://github.com/RiaanZoetmulder/Master-Thesis/tree/master/rationale (by Riaan Zoetmulder)

We optimize two modular (neural) components, generator and encoder, to produce rationales and predictions. The framework is generic -- generator and encoder can be implemented and realized in various ways such as using RNNs or CNNs. We train the model in a RL style using policy gradient (specifically REINFORCE), as illustrated below.

• this root directory contains impelmentation of the rationale model used for the beer review data. rationale.py implements the independent selection version and rationale_dependent.py implements the sequential selection version. See the paper for details.
• example_rationales contains rationales generated for the beer review data.
• ubuntu contains alternative implementation for the AskUbuntu data.
• medical contains alternative implementation for medical report classification.

• Proudct reviews: We provide subsets of reviews and pre-trained word embeddings at here. This should be sufficient for producing our results. Please contact the author of the dataset, Prof. McAuley for the full set (1.5 million reviews).
• AskUbuntu data: AskUbuntu question data is available in this repo.
• Pathology data: This data is not available due to patients' privacy. We only provide the code and example snapshot at /medical directory

Important Note: all data is for research-purpose only.

To run the code, you need Numpy and Theano (> 0.7.0.dev-8d3a67 I used) installed. Next:

1. Clone the rcnn repo
2. Use “export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/rcnn/code” to add the rcnn/code directory to Python library
3. Run python rationale.py --help or python rationale_dependent.py --help to see all running options

Example run of beer review data:

THEANO_FLAGS='device=gpu,floatX=float32'        # use GPU and 32-bit float
python rationale.py                             # independent selection version
      --embedding /path/to/vectors              # path to load word vectors (required)
      --train reviews.aspect0.train.txt.gz      # path to training set (required)
      --dev reviews.aspect0.heldout.txt.gz      # path to development set (required)        
      --load_rationale annotations.json         # path to rationale annotation for testing (required)
      --aspect 0                                # which aspect (-1 means all aspects)
      --dump outputs.json                       # dump selected rationales and predictions
      --sparsity 0.0003 --coherent 2.0          # regularizations

• better documentation of the code
• more example usage of the code
• put trained models in the repo??