@inproceedings{bailleux-etal-2025-connecting,
    title = "Connecting Concept Layers and Rationales to Enhance Language Model Interpretability",
    author = "Bailleux, Thomas  and
      Mukherjee, Tanmoy  and
      Marquis, Pierre  and
      Bouraoui, Zied",
    editor = "Frermann, Lea  and
      Stevenson, Mark",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.starsem-1.33/",
    pages = "409--429",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-340-1",
    abstract = "With the introduction of large language models, NLP has undergone a paradigm shift where these models now serve as the backbone of most developed systems. However, while highly effective, they remain opaque and difficult to interpret, which limits their adoption in critical applications that require transparency and trust. Two major approaches aim to address this: rationale extraction, which highlights input spans that justify predictions, and concept bottleneck models, which make decisions through human-interpretable concepts. Yet each has limitations. Crucially, current models lack a unified framework that connects where a model looks (rationales) with why it makes a decision (concepts). We introduce CLARITY, a model that first selects key input spans, maps them to interpretable concepts, and then predicts using only those concepts. This design supports faithful, multi-level explanations and allows users to intervene at both the rationale and concept levels. CLARITY, achieves competitive accuracy while offering improved transparency and controllability."
}