Staying True to Your Word: (How) Can Attention Become Explanation?

The attention mechanism has quickly become ubiquitous in NLP. In addition to improving performance of models, attention has been widely used as a glimpse into the inner workings of NLP models. The latter aspect has in the recent years become a common topic of discussion, most notably in work of Jain and Wallace, 2019; Wiegreffe and Pinter, 2019. With the shortcomings of using attention weights…