“Explanations can increase the transparency of neural networks and make them more trustworthy. However, can we really trust explanations generated by the existing explanation methods? If the explanation methods are not stable enough, the credibility of the explanation will be greatly reduced. Previous studies seldom considered such an important issue. To this end, this paper proposes a new evaluation frame to evaluate the stability of current typical feature attribution explanation methods via textual adversarial attack. Our frame could generate adversarial examples with similar textual semantics. Such adversarial examples will make the original models have the same outputs, but make most current explanation methods deduce completely different explanations. Under this frame, we test five classical explanation methods and show their performance on several stability-related metrics. Experimental results show our evaluation is effective and could reveal the stability performance of existing explanation methods.”

In this paper we focus on machine reading comprehension in social media. In this domain onenormally posts a message on the assumption that the readers have specific background knowledge. Therefore those messages are usually short and lacking in background information whichis different from the text in the other domain. Thus it is difficult for a machine to understandthe messages comprehensively. Fortunately a key nature of social media is clustering. A group of people tend to express their opinion or report news around one topic. Having realized this we propose a novel method that utilizes the topic knowledge implied by the clustered messages to aid in the comprehension of those short messages. The experiments on TweetQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

The irrelevant information in documents poses a great challenge for machine reading compre-hension (MRC). To deal with such a challenge current MRC models generally fall into twoseparate parts: evidence extraction and answer prediction where the former extracts the key evi-dence corresponding to the question and the latter predicts the answer based on those sentences.However such pipeline paradigms tend to accumulate errors i.e. extracting the incorrect evi-dence results in predicting the wrong answer. In order to address this problem we propose aMulti-Strategy Knowledge Distillation based Teacher-Student framework (MSKDTS) for ma-chine reading comprehension. In our approach we first take evidence and document respec-tively as the input reference information to build a teacher model and a student model. Then the multi-strategy knowledge distillation method transfers the knowledge from the teacher model to the student model at both feature and prediction level through knowledge distillation approach.Therefore in the testing phase the enhanced student model can predict answer similar to the teacher model without being aware of which sentence is the corresponding evidence in the docu-ment. Experimental results on the ReCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approachand further ablation studies prove the effectiveness of both knowledge distillation strategies.