CommonsenseVIS: Visualizing and Understanding Commonsense Reasoning
  Capabilities of Natural Language Models
Xingbo Wang Renfei Huang Zhihua Jin Tianqing Fang Huamin Qu
Recently, large pretrained language models have achieved compelling
performance on commonsense benchmarks. Nevertheless, it is unclear what
commonsense knowledge the models learn and whether they solely exploit spurious
patterns. Feature attributions are popular explainability techniques that
identify important input concepts for model outputs. However, commonsense
knowledge tends to be implicit and rarely explicitly presented in inputs. These
methods cannot infer models' implicit reasoning over mentioned concepts. We
present CommonsenseVIS, a visual explanatory system that utilizes external
commonsense knowledge bases to contextualize model behavior for commonsense
question-answering. Specifically, we extract relevant commonsense knowledge in
inputs as references to align model behavior with human knowledge. Our system
features multi-level visualization and interactive model probing and editing
for different concepts and their underlying relations. Through a user study, we
show that CommonsenseVIS helps NLP experts conduct a systematic and scalable
visual analysis of models' relational reasoning over concepts in different
situations.