Towards trustworthiness in the context of explainable search

Abstract

Explainable AI (XAI) is currently a vibrant research topic. However, the absence of ground truth explanations makes it difficult to evaluate XAI systems such as Explainable Search. We present an Explainable Search system with a focus on evaluating the XAI aspect of Trustworthiness along with the retrieval performance. We present SIMFIC 2.0 (Similarity in Fiction), an enhanced version of a recent [1] explainable search system. The system retrieves books similar to a selected book in a query-by-example setting. The motivation is to explain the notion of similarity in fiction books. We extract hand-crafted interpretable features for fiction books and provide global explanations by fitting a linear regression and local explanations based on similarity measures. The Trustworthiness facet is evaluated using user studies, while the ranking performance is compared by analysis of user clicks. Eye tracking is used to investigate user attention to the explanation elements when interacting with the interface. Initial experiments show statistically significant results on the Trustworthiness of the system, paving way for interesting research directions that are being investigated.