A Counterfactual Explanation Framework for Retrieval Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing literature on explainability of information retrieval has focused on illustrating the concept of relevance concerning a retrieval model.
Approach: They propose to add terms to a document to improve its ranking to answer the question of which words played a role in not being favored by a retrieval model.
Outcome: The proposed framework predicts counterfactuals for statistical and deep-learning models.

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