I recently read a new NLP paper called CNM: An Interpretable Complex-valued Network for Matching (https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05298). In summary, the paper proposes a framework for NLP explainability using complex-valued vector spaces, borrowing math frameworks from quantum mechanics. It even won an award at this years NAACL. Reading the paper however, I couldn’t help but to feel a bit mislead. There seemed to be a stretching of the applications of quantum mechanics and there were a lot of ideas proposed in the paper which had little evidence to back them up. I was so bothered by it in fact that I wrote a blog post about it. There’s also a great paper I read that talks more about the state of research in the field: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03341.

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I wanted to know people’s thoughts on the matter. Do you think we’re critical enough as a community? Do you feel because of the recent successes of machine learning/deep learning research, people maybe are hesitant to speak out or to ask more questions on why things work?