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Byron Wallace

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Computation and Language Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Neural and Evolutionary Computing

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preprint2026arXiv

Interpretability Can Be Actionable

Interpretability aims to explain the behavior of deep neural networks. Despite rapid growth, there is mounting concern that much of this work has not translated into practical impact, raising questions about its relevance and utility. This position paper argues that the central missing ingredient is not new methods, but evaluation criteria: interpretability should be evaluated by actionability--the extent to which insights enable concrete decisions and interventions beyond interpretability research itself. We define actionable interpretability along two dimensions--concreteness and validation--and analyze the barriers currently preventing real-world impact. To address these barriers, we identify five domains where interpretability offers unique leverage and present a framework for actionable interpretability with evaluation criteria aligned with practical outcomes. Our goal is not to downplay exploratory research, but to establish actionability as a core objective of interpretability research.

preprint2016arXiv

A Sensitivity Analysis of (and Practitioners' Guide to) Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently achieved remarkably strong performance on the practically important task of sentence classification (kim 2014, kalchbrenner 2014, johnson 2014). However, these models require practitioners to specify an exact model architecture and set accompanying hyperparameters, including the filter region size, regularization parameters, and so on. It is currently unknown how sensitive model performance is to changes in these configurations for the task of sentence classification. We thus conduct a sensitivity analysis of one-layer CNNs to explore the effect of architecture components on model performance; our aim is to distinguish between important and comparatively inconsequential design decisions for sentence classification. We focus on one-layer CNNs (to the exclusion of more complex models) due to their comparative simplicity and strong empirical performance, which makes it a modern standard baseline method akin to Support Vector Machine (SVMs) and logistic regression. We derive practical advice from our extensive empirical results for those interested in getting the most out of CNNs for sentence classification in real world settings.

preprint2016arXiv

MGNC-CNN: A Simple Approach to Exploiting Multiple Word Embeddings for Sentence Classification

We introduce a novel, simple convolution neural network (CNN) architecture - multi-group norm constraint CNN (MGNC-CNN) that capitalizes on multiple sets of word embeddings for sentence classification. MGNC-CNN extracts features from input embedding sets independently and then joins these at the penultimate layer in the network to form a final feature vector. We then adopt a group regularization strategy that differentially penalizes weights associated with the subcomponents generated from the respective embedding sets. This model is much simpler than comparable alternative architectures and requires substantially less training time. Furthermore, it is flexible in that it does not require input word embeddings to be of the same dimensionality. We show that MGNC-CNN consistently outperforms baseline models.

preprint2014arXiv

Graph-Sparse LDA: A Topic Model with Structured Sparsity

Originally designed to model text, topic modeling has become a powerful tool for uncovering latent structure in domains including medicine, finance, and vision. The goals for the model vary depending on the application: in some cases, the discovered topics may be used for prediction or some other downstream task. In other cases, the content of the topic itself may be of intrinsic scientific interest. Unfortunately, even using modern sparse techniques, the discovered topics are often difficult to interpret due to the high dimensionality of the underlying space. To improve topic interpretability, we introduce Graph-Sparse LDA, a hierarchical topic model that leverages knowledge of relationships between words (e.g., as encoded by an ontology). In our model, topics are summarized by a few latent concept-words from the underlying graph that explain the observed words. Graph-Sparse LDA recovers sparse, interpretable summaries on two real-world biomedical datasets while matching state-of-the-art prediction performance.