Augmenting pre-trained language models with knowledge graphs (KGs) has achieved success on various commonsense reasoning tasks. However, for a given task instance, the KG, or certain parts of the KG, may not be useful. Although KG-augmented models often use attention to focus on specific KG components, the KG is still always used, and the attention mechanism is never explicitly taught which KG components should be used. Meanwhile, saliency methods can measure how much a KG feature (e.g., graph, node, path) influences the model to make the correct prediction, thus explaining which KG features are useful. This paper explores how saliency explanations can be used to improve KG-augmented models performance. First, we propose to create coarse (Is the KG useful?) and fine (Which nodes/paths in the KG are useful?) saliency explanations. Second, we propose SalKG, a framework for KG-augmented models to learn from coarse and/or fine saliency explanations. Given saliency explanations created from a tasks training set, SalKG jointly trains the model to predict the explanations, then solve the task by attending to KG features highlighted by the predicted explanations. On two popular commonsense QA benchmarks (CSQA, OBQA), we show that textsc{SalKG} models can yield large performance gains -- up to 3.27% on CSQA.
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