Do Transformer Models Show Similar Attention Patterns to Task-Specific Human Gaze?

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Learned self-attention functions in state-of-the-art NLP models often correlate with human attention. We investigate whether self-attention in large-scale pre-trained language models is as predictive of human eye fixation patterns during task-reading as classical cognitive models of human attention. We compare attention functions across two task-specific reading datasets for sentiment analysis and relation extraction. We find the predictiveness of large-scale pretrained self-attention for human attention depends on 'what is in the tail', e.g., the syntactic nature of rare contexts. Further, we observe that task-specific fine-tuning does not increase the correlation with human task-specific reading. Through an input reduction experiment we give complementary insights on the sparsity and fidelity trade-off, showing that lower-entropy attention vectors are more faithful.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACL 2022 - 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
EditorsSmaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2022
Pages4295-4309
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917216
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022 - Dublin, Ireland
Duration: 22 May 202227 May 2022

Conference

Conference60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2022
LandIreland
ByDublin
Periode22/05/202227/05/2022
SponsorAmazon Science, Bloomberg Engineering, et al., Google Research, Liveperson, Meta
SeriesProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1
ISSN0736-587X

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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