Sourav Saha

Sourav Saha

PhD student in the domain of IR and ML

Tutorial at SIGIR 2023: Explainable Information Retrieval

Published:

This half-day tutorial is divided into two parts of 90 minutes each – In the first part we explore the notions of explainable IR, probing neural models and explainable-by-design approaches. In the second half, we delve deeper into axiomatic IR and its connection to interpretability and some of the popular posthoc approaches.


Contents

  1. Full Slides.
  2. Notions of Explainable IR by Avishek Anand.
  3. Intrinsic Methods for ExIR by Avishek Anand.
  4. Probing transformer models by Avishek Anand.


  1. Posthoc approaches in ExIR by Procheta Sen.
  2. Axiomatic IR for Interpretability by Sourav Saha.
  3. Outlook and Conclusion by Avishek Anand.


Notebooks

  1. Listwise explanation
  2. Pointwise explanation
  3. Axiomatic result reranking

References


[1] “Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps”, Adebayo et al., NeurIPS 2018.

[2] “LIRME: Locally Interpretable Ranking Model Explanation”, Verma and Ganguly, SIGIR 2019.

[3] “The Curious Case of IR Explainability: Explaining Document Scores within and across Ranking Models”, Sen et al., SIGIR 2020.

[4] “Model agnostic interpretability of rankers via intent modelling”, Singh and Anand, FAT 2020.

[5] “Listwise Explanations for Ranking Models Using Multiple Explainers”, Lyu et al., ECIR 2023.

[6] “Query Understanding via Intent Description Generation”, Zhang et al., CIKM 2020.

[7] “A formal study of information retrieval heuristics”, Fang et al., SIGIR 2004.

[8] “Axiomatic Result Re-Ranking”, Hagen et al., CIKM 2016.

[9] “Aggregating inconsistent information: Ranking and clustering”, Ailon et al., JACM 2008.

[10] “Explainable k-Means and k-Medians Clustering”, Dasgupta et al., ICML 2020.

[11] “Towards Axiomatic Explanations for Neural Ranking Models”, Volske et al., ICTIR 2021.

[12] “An Axiomatic Approach to Diagnosing Neural IR Models”, Rennings et al., ECIR 2019.

[13] “Diagnosing BERT with Retrieval Heuristics”, Camara and Hauff, ECIR 2020.

[14] “Explainable Information Retrieval: A Survey”, Anand et al., arXiv:2211.02405.

[15] “Explainability of Text Processing and Retrieval Methods: A Critical Survey”, Saha et al., arXiv:2212.07126.