SSE: A Metric for Evaluating Search System Explainability

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Catherine, Eickhoff, Carsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Chen, Catherine
Eickhoff, Carsten
author_facet Chen, Catherine
Eickhoff, Carsten
contents Explainable Information Retrieval (XIR) is a growing research area focused on enhancing transparency and trustworthiness of the complex decision-making processes taking place in modern information retrieval systems. While there has been progress in developing XIR systems, empirical evaluation tools to assess the degree of explainability attained by such systems are lacking. To close this gap and gain insights into the true merit of XIR systems, we extend existing insights from a factor analysis of search explainability to introduce SSE (Search System Explainability), an evaluation metric for XIR search systems. Through 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. Additionally, we observe comparable perceived temporal demand and performance levels between non-native and native English speakers. 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_2306_10175
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SSE: A Metric for Evaluating Search System Explainability
Chen, Catherine
Eickhoff, Carsten
Information Retrieval
Explainable Information Retrieval (XIR) is a growing research area focused on enhancing transparency and trustworthiness of the complex decision-making processes taking place in modern information retrieval systems. While there has been progress in developing XIR systems, empirical evaluation tools to assess the degree of explainability attained by such systems are lacking. To close this gap and gain insights into the true merit of XIR systems, we extend existing insights from a factor analysis of search explainability to introduce SSE (Search System Explainability), an evaluation metric for XIR search systems. Through 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. Additionally, we observe comparable perceived temporal demand and performance levels between non-native and native English speakers. 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 SSE: A Metric for Evaluating Search System Explainability
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10175