Explanation-Based Human Debugging of NLP Models: A Survey

To fix a bug in a program, we need to locate where the bug is, understand why it causes the problem, and patch the code accordingly. This process becomes harder when the program is a trained machine learning model and even harder for opaque deep learning models. In this survey, we review papers that exploit explanations to enable humans to debug NLP models. We call this problem explanation-based human debugging (EBHD). In particular, we categorize and discuss existing works along three main dimensions of EBHD (the bug context, the workflow, and the experimental setting), compile findings on how EBHD components affect human debuggers, and highlight open problems that could be future research directions.