Explainable Natural Language Processing with Matrix Product States

Despite empirical successes of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in natural language processing (NLP), theoretical understanding of RNNs is still limited due to intrinsically complex computations in RNNs. We perform a systematic analysis of RNNs' behaviors in a ubiquitous NLP task, the sentiment analysis of movie reviews, via the mapping between a class of RNNs called recurrent arithmetic circuits (RACs) and a matrix product state (MPS). Using the von-Neumann entanglement entropy (EE) as a proxy for information propagation, we show that single-layer RACs possess a maximum information propagation capacity, reflected by the saturation of the EE. Enlarging the bond dimension of an MPS beyond the EE saturation threshold does not increase the prediction accuracies, so a minimal model that best estimates the data statistics can be constructed. Although the saturated EE is smaller than the maximum EE achievable by the area law of an MPS, our model achieves ~99% training accuracies in realistic sentiment analysis data sets. Thus, low EE alone is not a warrant against the adoption of single-layer RACs for NLP. Contrary to a common belief that long-range information propagation is the main source of RNNs' expressiveness, we show that single-layer RACs also harness high expressiveness from meaningful word vector embeddings. Our work sheds light on the phenomenology of learning in RACs and more generally on the explainability aspects of RNNs for NLP, using tools from many-body quantum physics.