---
title: "Rethinking Cooperative Rationalization — paper by Yu et al. (2019)"
description: "The authors propose two fixes. 30 references, cited by 57 papers here. Among them: 118."
authors: ["Mo Yu", "Shiyu Chang", "Yang Zhang", "Tommi Jaakkola"]
year: 2019
venue: "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/D19-1420/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/d19-1420"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yu-2019-rethinking-cooperative-rationalization-introspective-extraction/"
---
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# Rethinking Cooperative Rationalization: Introspective Extraction and Complement Control

**Authors:** [Mo Yu](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mo-yu/), [Shiyu Chang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/shiyu-chang/), [Yang Zhang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/yang-zhang/) and [Tommi Jaakkola](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tommi-jaakkola/) · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/) ([EMNLP 2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/2019/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1420/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1420.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/d19-1420](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-1420) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2970155250)

**Citations:** 118 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [57](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yu-2019-rethinking-cooperative-rationalization-introspective-extraction/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Selective rationalization trains a generator to highlight a small part of the input text and a predictor that classifies using only that highlighted part. This paper identifies two weaknesses of the cooperative setup.
- **No access to the outcome.** The generator does not know which outcome it should justify, so training can settle into poorly generalizing solutions.
- **No control over the unselected text.** Nothing checks what is left out of the rationale. This allows "degeneration": the two players agree on a trivial code, such as punctuation or word position, that signals the label without explaining it.

The authors propose two fixes. The first is an introspective generator, which receives the label predicted from the full text as an extra input. The second is a three-player game that adds an adversarial complement predictor. This third player tries to recover the label from the words outside the rationale, and the generator tries to defeat it.

They formalize three properties of a good rationale: sufficiency, comprehensiveness and compactness. They show theoretically that the game's equilibrium yields rationales with these properties. Experiments use beer-review sentiment and relation classification. The combined model keeps predictive accuracy high and produces more complete, non-degenerate rationales than Lei et al. (2016). Human studies support this result.

## Key points
- **Comprehensiveness condition.** The label entropy given the complement must exceed the label entropy given the rationale by some margin. The authors argue that only this condition rules out degeneration.
- **Model variants.** The paper compares three frameworks:
  - the cooperative baseline of Lei et al. (2016);
  - the same baseline with an added complement predictor (minimax);
  - the full introspective three-player model (Intros+minimax).
- **Human evaluation on beer reviews.** Annotators saw only the unselected text. The full model drove their label guesses closer to chance and led to more "UNK" answers. Some differences were significant at p \< 0.005 (t-test).
- **Relation classification.** Lei et al. (2016) sometimes failed to cover both entities. Dataset biases led the proposed model to occasionally keep extra correlated words, such as "working".
- **Code and data** are released at github.com/Gorov/three_player_for_emnlp.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Yang Zhang and Tommi Jaakkola. 2019. Rethinking Cooperative Rationalization: Introspective Extraction and Complement Control. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{yu2019rethinking,
  title = {{Rethinking Cooperative Rationalization: Introspective Extraction and Complement Control}},
  author = {Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Yang Zhang and Tommi Jaakkola},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/d19-1420},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d19-1420}
}
```

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