Counterfactual Editing for Search Result Explanation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Zhichao, Lamba, Hemank, Ai, Qingyao, Tetreault, Joel, Jaimes, Alex
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Xu, Zhichao
Lamba, Hemank
Ai, Qingyao
Tetreault, Joel
Jaimes, Alex
author_facet Xu, Zhichao
Lamba, Hemank
Ai, Qingyao
Tetreault, Joel
Jaimes, Alex
contents Search Result Explanation (SeRE) aims to improve search sessions' effectiveness and efficiency by helping users interpret documents' relevance. Existing works mostly focus on factual explanation, i.e. to find/generate supporting evidence about documents' relevance to search queries. However, research in cognitive sciences has shown that human explanations are contrastive i.e. people explain an observed event using some counterfactual events; such explanations reduce cognitive load and provide actionable insights. Though already proven effective in machine learning and NLP communities, there lacks a strict formulation on how counterfactual explanations should be defined and structured, in the context of web search. In this paper, we first discuss the possible formulation of counterfactual explanations in the IR context. Next, we formulate a suite of desiderata for counterfactual explanation in SeRE task and corresponding automatic metrics. With this desiderata, we propose a method named \textbf{C}ounter\textbf{F}actual \textbf{E}diting for Search Research \textbf{E}xplanation (\textbf{CFE2}). CFE2 provides pairwise counterfactual explanations for document pairs within a search engine result page. Our experiments on five public search datasets demonstrate that CFE2 can significantly outperform baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2301_10389
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Counterfactual Editing for Search Result Explanation
Xu, Zhichao
Lamba, Hemank
Ai, Qingyao
Tetreault, Joel
Jaimes, Alex
Information Retrieval
Search Result Explanation (SeRE) aims to improve search sessions' effectiveness and efficiency by helping users interpret documents' relevance. Existing works mostly focus on factual explanation, i.e. to find/generate supporting evidence about documents' relevance to search queries. However, research in cognitive sciences has shown that human explanations are contrastive i.e. people explain an observed event using some counterfactual events; such explanations reduce cognitive load and provide actionable insights. Though already proven effective in machine learning and NLP communities, there lacks a strict formulation on how counterfactual explanations should be defined and structured, in the context of web search. In this paper, we first discuss the possible formulation of counterfactual explanations in the IR context. Next, we formulate a suite of desiderata for counterfactual explanation in SeRE task and corresponding automatic metrics. With this desiderata, we propose a method named \textbf{C}ounter\textbf{F}actual \textbf{E}diting for Search Research \textbf{E}xplanation (\textbf{CFE2}). CFE2 provides pairwise counterfactual explanations for document pairs within a search engine result page. Our experiments on five public search datasets demonstrate that CFE2 can significantly outperform baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations.
title Counterfactual Editing for Search Result Explanation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10389