Explainable information retrieval is an emerging research area aiming to make transparent and trustworthy information retrieval systems. Given the increasing use of complex machine learning models in search systems, explainability is essential in building and auditing responsible information retrieval models. This survey fills a vital gap in the otherwise topically diverse literature of explainable information retrieval. It categorizes and discusses recent explainability methods developed for different application domains in information retrieval, providing a common framework and unifying perspectives. In addition, it reflects on the common concern of evaluating explanations and highlights open challenges and opportunities.
Retrieval models in information retrieval are used to rank documents for typically under-specified queries. Today machine learning is used to learn retrieval models from click logs and/or relevance judgments that maximizes an objective correlated with user satisfaction. As these models become increasingly powerful and sophisticated, they also become harder to understand. Consequently, it is hard for to identify artifacts in training, data specific biases and intents from a complex trained model like neural rankers even if trained purely on text features. EXS is a search system designed specifi…
Thanks to recent advancements in machine learning, vector-based methods have been adopted in many modern information retrieval (IR) systems. While showing promising retrieval performance, these approaches typically fail to explain why a particular document is retrieved as a query result to address explainable information retrieval(XIR). Knowledge graphs record structured information about entities and inherently explainable relationships. Most of existing XIR approaches focus exclusively on the retrieval model with little consideration on using existing knowledge graphs for providing an explan…
G-Refer: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for Explainable Recommendation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）
EndoFinder: Online Image Retrieval for Explainable Colorectal Polyp Diagnosis
Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University（复旦大学基础医学院数字医学研究中心）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University（浙江大学上海高等研究院）；Endoscopy Center and Endoscopy Research Institute, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University（复旦大学附属中山医院内镜中心及内镜研究所）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学联盟曼彻斯特商学院）
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some contexts). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the tran…
This survey paper discusses different forms of malicious techniques that can affect how an information retrieval model retrieves documents for a query and their remedies.
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Explainable recommendation has shown its great advantages for improving recommendation persuasiveness, user satisfaction, system transparency, among others. A fundamental problem of explainable recommendation is how to evaluate the explanations. In the past few years, various evaluation strategies have been proposed. However, they are scattered in different papers, and there lacks a systematic and detailed comparison between them. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we comprehensively review the previous work, and provide different taxonomies for them according to the evaluation perspectives an…
Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking functions, the underlying retrieval models have been continually evolved with the ever-lasting technical innovation. To design effective retrieval models, a key point lies in how to learn the text representation and model the relevance matching. The recent success of pretrained language models (PLMs) sheds light on developing more capable text retrieval approac…
The continuous growth in the XML information repositories has been matched by increasing efforts in development of XML retrieval systems, in large parts aiming at supporting content-oriented XML retrieval. These systems exploit the available structural information, as market up in XML documents, in order to return documents components- the so called XML elements-instead of the complement documents in repose to the user query. In this paper, we provide an overview of the different XML information retrieval systems and classify them according to their storage and query evaluation strategies.
This paper is a survey discussing Information Retrieval concepts, methods, and applications. It goes deep into the document and query modelling involved in IR systems, in addition to pre-processing operations such as removing stop words and searching by synonym techniques. The paper also tackles text categorization along with its application in neural networks and machine learning. Finally, the architecture of web crawlers is to be discussed shedding the light on how internet spiders index web documents and how they allow users to search for items on the web.
Since 2004, researchers have been using the mathematical framework of Quantum Theory (QT) in Information Retrieval (IR). QT offers a generalized probability and logic framework. Such a framework has been shown capable of unifying the representation, ranking and user cognitive aspects of IR, and helpful in developing more dynamic, adaptive and context-aware IR systems. Although Quantum-inspired IR is still a growing area, a wide array of work in different aspects of IR has been done and produced promising results. This paper presents a survey of the research done in this area, aiming to show th…
AgenticRAG: Tool-Augmented Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Explainable Recommender Systems
Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China hangli\；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China zehua\；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China xiaofan\；Economic Law School China University of Political Science；School of Computer Science Peking University Beijing, China
Tables are a powerful and popular tool for organizing and manipulating data. A vast number of tables can be found on the Web, which represents a valuable knowledge resource. The objective of this survey is to synthesize and present two decades of research on web tables. In particular, we organize existing literature into six main categories of information access tasks: table extraction, table interpretation, table search, question answering, knowledge base augmentation, and table augmentation. For each of these tasks, we identify and describe seminal approaches, present relevant resources, and…
We present a short survey of the literature on indexing and retrieval of mathematical knowledge, with pointers to 72 papers and tentative taxonomies of both retrieval problems and recurring techniques.
With the ever increasing size of the web, relevant information extraction on the Internet with a query formed by a few keywords has become a big challenge. Query Expansion (QE) plays a crucial role in improving searches on the Internet. Here, the user's initial query is reformulated by adding additional meaningful terms with similar significance. QE -- as part of information retrieval (IR) -- has long attracted researchers' attention. It has become very influential in the field of personalized social document, question answering, cross-language IR, information filtering and multimedia IR. Rese…
Explainable AI for Mental Disorder Detection via Social Media: A survey and outlook
Department of Computer Science, University of York, Heslington, United Kingdom（英国约克大学计算机科学系）；French-Azerbaijani University under Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University（阿塞拜疆国家石油和工业大学下的法语-阿塞拜疆大学）
The explosive increase and ubiquitous accessibility of visual data on the Web have led to the prosperity of research activity in image search or retrieval. With the ignorance of visual content as a ranking clue, methods with text search techniques for visual retrieval may suffer inconsistency between the text words and visual content. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), which makes use of the representation of visual content to identify relevant images, has attracted sustained attention in recent two decades. Such a problem is challenging due to the intention gap and the semantic gap problem…
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）
The success of neural network embeddings has entailed a renewed interest in using knowledge graphs for a wide variety of machine learning and information retrieval tasks. In particular, recent recommendation methods based on graph embeddings have shown state-of-the-art performance. In general, these methods encode latent rating patterns and content features. Differently from previous work, in this paper, we propose to exploit embeddings extracted from graphs that combine information from ratings and aspect-based opinions expressed in textual reviews. We then adapt and evaluate state-of-the-art…
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)（阿米尔卡比尔理工大学（德黑兰理工大学））
Text-based Question Answering (QA) is a challenging task which aims at finding short concrete answers for users' questions. This line of research has been widely studied with information retrieval techniques and has received increasing attention in recent years by considering deep neural network approaches. Deep learning approaches, which are the main focus of this paper, provide a powerful technique to learn multiple layers of representations and interaction between questions and texts. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of different models proposed for the QA task, including …
Content based image retrieval, a technique which uses visual contents of image to search images from large scale image databases according to users' interests. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on recent technology used in the area of content based face image retrieval. Nowadays digital devices and photo sharing sites are getting more popularity, large human face photos are available in database. Multiple types of facial features are used to represent discriminality on large scale human facial image database. Searching and mining of facial images are challenging problems and important…
