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Recommending products to users with intuitive explanations helps improve the system in transparency, persuasiveness, and satisfaction. Existing interpretation techniques include post-hoc methods and interpretable modeling. The former category could quantitatively analyze input contribution to model prediction but has limited interpretation faithfulness, while the latter could explain model internal mechanisms but may not directly attribute model predictions to input features. In this study, we propose a novelDualInterpretableRecommendation model called DIRECT, which integrates ideas of the two interpretation categories to inherit their advantages and avoid limitations. Specifically, DIRECT makes use of item descriptions as explainable evidence for recommendation. First, similar to the post-hoc interpretation, DIRECT could attribute the prediction of a user preference score to textual words of the item descriptions. The attribution of each word is related to its sentiment polarity and word importance, where a word is important if it corresponds to an item aspect that the user is interested in. Second, to improve the interpretability of embedding space, we propose to extract high-level concepts from embeddings, where each concept corresponds to an item aspect. To learn discriminative concepts, we employ a concept-bottleneck layer, and maximize the coding rate reduction on word-aspect embeddings by leveraging a word-word affinity graph extracted from a pre-trained language model. In this way, DIRECT simultaneously achieves faithful attribution and usable interpretation of embedding space. We also show that DIRECT achieves linear inference time complexity regarding the length of item reviews. We conduct experiments including ablation studies on five real-world datasets. Quantitative analysis, visualizations, and case studies verify the interpretability of DIRECT. Our code is available at:https://github.com/JacksonWuxs/DIRECT. 

Traditional sentence embedding models encode sentences into vector representations to capture useful properties such as the semantic similarity between sentences. However, in addition to similarity, sentence semantics can also be interpreted via compositional operations such as sentence fusion or difference. It is unclear whether the compositional semantics of sentences can be directly reflected as compositional operations in the embedding space. To more effectively bridge the continuous embedding and discrete text spaces, we explore the plausibility of incorporating various compositional properties into the sentence embedding space that allows us to interpret embedding transformations as compositional sentence operations. We propose InterSent, an end-to-end framework for learning interpretable sentence embeddings that supports compositional sentence operations in the embedding space. Our method optimizes operator networks and a bottleneck encoder-decoder model to produce meaningful and interpretable sentence embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the interpretability of sentence embeddings on four textual generation tasks over existing approaches while maintaining strong performance on traditional semantic similarity tasks. 

Abstractive summarization models typically learn to capture the salient information from scratch implicitly.Recent literature adds extractive summaries as guidance for abstractive summarization models to provide hints of salient content and achieves better performance.However, extractive summaries as guidance could be over strict, leading to information loss or noisy signals.Furthermore, it cannot easily adapt to documents with various abstractiveness.As the number and allocation of salience content pieces varies, it is hard to find a fixed threshold deciding which content should be included in the guidance.In this paper, we propose a novel summarization approach with a flexible and reliable salience guidance, namely SEASON (SaliencE Allocation as Guidance for Abstractive SummarizatiON).SEASON utilizes the allocation of salience expectation to guide abstractive summarization and adapts well to articles in different abstractiveness.Automatic and human evaluations on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed method is effective and reliable.Empirical results on more than one million news articles demonstrate a natural fifteen-fifty salience split for news article sentences, providing a useful insight for composing news articles.