@inproceedings{jacovi-etal-2023-neighboring,
    title = "Neighboring Words Affect Human Interpretation of Saliency Explanations",
    author = "Jacovi, Alon  and
      Schuff, Hendrik  and
      Adel, Heike  and
      Vu, Ngoc Thang  and
      Goldberg, Yoav",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.750",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.750",
    pages = "11816--11833",
    abstract = "Word-level saliency explanations ({``}heat maps over words{''}) are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the communicated saliency scores. We conduct a user study to investigate how the marking of a word{'}s *neighboring words* affect the explainee{'}s perception of the word{'}s importance in the context of a saliency explanation. We find that neighboring words have significant effects on the word{'}s importance rating. Concretely, we identify that the influence changes based on neighboring direction (left vs. right) and a-priori linguistic and computational measures of phrases and collocations (vs. unrelated neighboring words).Our results question whether text-based saliency explanations should be continued to be communicated at word level, and inform future research on alternative saliency explanation methods.",
}

Word-level saliency explanations ({``}heat maps over words{''}) are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the communicated saliency scores. We conduct a user study to investigate how the marking of a word{'}s *neighboring words* affect the explainee{'}s perception of the word{'}s importance in the context of a saliency explanation. We find that neighboring words have significant effects on the word{'}s importance rating. Concretely, we identify that the influence changes based on neighboring direction (left vs. right) and a-priori linguistic and computational measures of phrases and collocations (vs. unrelated neighboring words).Our results question whether text-based saliency explanations should be continued to be communicated at word level, and inform future research on alternative saliency explanation methods.
Jacovi, Alon Schuff, Hendrik Adel, Heike Vu, Ngoc Thang Goldberg, Yoav
Neighboring Words Affect Human Interpretation of Saliency Explanations