Interpretable Discriminative Text Representations via Agreement and Label Disentanglement

arXiv:2605.20693v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Interpretable text representations should expose coordinates that are not only predictive, but also meaningful enough for independent auditors to apply. Existing discriminative representations often use anonymous embedding directions, while concept-bottleneck and LLM-assisted methods attach natural-language names to features without ensuring that those definitions are reproducible or distinct from the target label. We propose an operational criterion for interpretable discriminative text representations: each coordinate should satisfy conceptual clarity, measured by chance-adjusted agreement between independent annotators applying the feature definition, and label disentanglement, meaning the feature should not merely paraphrase the prediction target. We instantiate this criterion in LLM-assisted Feature Discovery (LFD), an iterative method that proposes lexical and semantic features from contrastive outcome-opposed text pairs, screens candidates using cross-LLM Cohen’s $kappa$, and selects features by residual held-out predictive gain. A stylized analysis connects the $kappa$ screen to a per-feature annotation-noise bound, formalizing agreement as a reliability check. Across ten text-classification tasks spanning seven corpora, LFD matches the predictive performance of a strong text bottleneck baseline while producing substantially clearer and less label-entangled features. Human audits with 232 raters show that LFD features achieve higher human–human and human–LLM agreement than baseline concepts, and raters consistently judge them as less label-leaking. These results suggest that agreement-tested, label-disentangled coordinates provide a practical auditability standard for interpretable text classification.