Explanations are an important tool for gaining insights into model behavior, calibrating user trust, and ensuring compliance.Past few years have seen a flurry of methods for generating explanations, many of which involve computing model gradients or solving specially designed optimization problems.Owing to the remarkable reasoning abilities of LLMs, *self-explanation*, i.e., prompting the model to explain its outputs has recently emerged as a new paradigm.We study a specific type of self-explanations, *self-generated counterfactual explanations* (SCEs).We test LLMs’ ability to generate SCEs across families, sizes, temperatures, and datasets. We find that LLMs sometimes struggle to generate SCEs. When they do, their prediction often does not agree with their own counterfactual reasoning.

While neural networks are ubiquitous in state-of-the-art semantic parsers, it has been shown that most standard models suffer from dramatic performance losses when faced with compositionally out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Recently several methods have been proposed to improve compositional generalization in semantic parsing. In this work we instead focus on the problem of detecting compositionally OOD examples with neural semantic parsers, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been investigated before. We investigate several strong yet simple methods for OOD detection based on predictive uncertainty. The experimental results demonstrate that these techniques perform well on the standard SCAN and CFQ datasets. Moreover, we show that OOD detection can be further improved by using a heterogeneous ensemble.

Building systems that can communicate with humans is a core problem in Artificial Intelligence. This work proposes a novel neural network architecture for response selection in an end-to-end multi-turn conversational dialogue setting. The architecture applies context level attention and incorporates additional external knowledge provided by descriptions of domain-specific words. It uses a bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for encoding context and responses and learns to attend over the context words given the latent response representation and vice versa. In addition, it incorporates external domain specific information using another GRU for encoding the domain keyword descriptions. This allows better representation of domain-specific keywords in responses and hence improves the overall performance. Experimental results show that our model outperforms all other state-of-the-art methods for response selection in multi-turn conversations.