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Main Authors: Chen, Catherine, Eickhoff, Carsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09430
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author Chen, Catherine
Eickhoff, Carsten
author_facet Chen, Catherine
Eickhoff, Carsten
contents As information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines and conversational agents, become ubiquitous in various domains, the need for transparent and explainable systems grows to ensure accountability, fairness, and unbiased results. Despite recent advances in explainable AI and IR techniques, there is no consensus on the definition of explainability. Existing approaches often treat it as a singular notion, disregarding the multidimensional definition postulated in the literature. In this paper, we use psychometrics and crowdsourcing to identify human-centered factors of explainability in Web search systems and introduce SSE (Search System Explainability), an evaluation metric for explainable IR (XIR) search systems. In a crowdsourced user study, we demonstrate SSE's ability to distinguish between explainable and non-explainable systems, showing that systems with higher scores indeed indicate greater interpretability. We hope that aside from these concrete contributions to XIR, this line of work will serve as a blueprint for similar explainability evaluation efforts in other domains of machine learning and natural language processing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_09430
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Search System Explainability with Psychometrics and Crowdsourcing
Chen, Catherine
Eickhoff, Carsten
Information Retrieval
As information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines and conversational agents, become ubiquitous in various domains, the need for transparent and explainable systems grows to ensure accountability, fairness, and unbiased results. Despite recent advances in explainable AI and IR techniques, there is no consensus on the definition of explainability. Existing approaches often treat it as a singular notion, disregarding the multidimensional definition postulated in the literature. In this paper, we use psychometrics and crowdsourcing to identify human-centered factors of explainability in Web search systems and introduce SSE (Search System Explainability), an evaluation metric for explainable IR (XIR) search systems. In a crowdsourced user study, we demonstrate SSE's ability to distinguish between explainable and non-explainable systems, showing that systems with higher scores indeed indicate greater interpretability. We hope that aside from these concrete contributions to XIR, this line of work will serve as a blueprint for similar explainability evaluation efforts in other domains of machine learning and natural language processing.
title Evaluating Search System Explainability with Psychometrics and Crowdsourcing
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09430