FR: Folded Rationalization with a Unified Encoder
Main Conference Track
Authors: Wei Liu, Haozhao Wang, Jun Wang, Ruixuan Li, Chao Yue, YuanKai Zhang

Rationalization aims to strengthen the interpretability of NLP models by extracting a subset of human-intelligible pieces of their inputting texts. Conventional works generally employ a two-phase model in which a generator selects the most important pieces, followed by a predictor that makes predictions based on the selected pieces. However, such a two-phase model may incur the degeneration problem where the predictor overfits to the noise generated by a not yet well-trained generator and in turn, leads the generator to converge to a suboptimal model that tends to select senseless pieces. To tackle this challenge, we propose Folded Rationalization (FR) that folds the two phases of the rationale model into one from the perspective of text semantic extraction. The key idea of FR is to employ a unified encoder between the generator and predictor, based on which FR can facilitate a better predictor by access to valuable information blocked by the generator in the traditional two-phase model and thus bring a better generator. Empirically, we show that FR improves the F1 score by up to 10.3% as compared to state-of-the-art methods.