Explain and Predict, and then Predict Again

A desirable property of learning systems is to be both effective and interpretable. Towards this goal, recent models have been proposed that first generate an extractive explanation from the input text and then generate a prediction on just the explanation called explain-then-predict models. These models primarily consider the task input as a supervision signal in learning an extractive explanation and do not effectively integrate rationales data as an additional inductive bias to improve task performance. We propose a novel yet simple approach ExPred, which uses multi-task learning in the explanation generation phase effectively trading-off explanation and prediction losses. Next, we use another prediction network on just the extracted explanations for optimizing the task performance. We conduct an extensive evaluation of our approach on three diverse language datasets - sentiment classification, fact-checking, and question answering - and find that we substantially outperform existing approaches.