Papers with explanation generation
Team SVMrank: Leveraging Feature-rich Support Vector Machines for Ranking Explanations to Elementary Science Questions (D19-53)
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| Challenge: | TextGraphs 2019 Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration tackles explanation generation for elementary science questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid pipelined machine learning model and rule-based system to address MIER-19 . they use a featurerich learning-to-rank machine learning and a rule-driven system to rerank the LTR model predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model was ranked fourth in the evaluation, close to the second and third ranked teams, achieving 39.4% MAP. |
QED: A Framework and Dataset for Explanations in Question Answering (2021.tacl-1)
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Matthew Lamm, Jennimaria Palomaki, Chris Alberti, Daniel Andor, Eunsol Choi, Livio Baldini Soares, Michael Collins
| Challenge: | Existing question answering systems provide no explanation of reasoning that leads to answer . linguistically informed, extensible framework provides explanations in question answering . |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistically informed, extensible framework for explanations in question answering . they propose an expert-annotated dataset of QED explanations built upon a subset of the Natural Questions dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the ability of untrained raters to spot errors in QA datasets. |
PromptExplainer: Explaining Language Models through Prompt-based Learning (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanation methods rely on linear approximations, accentuating irrelevant input tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aligns the explanation process with the masked language modeling task of pretrained language models and leverages prompt-based learning to generate class-dependent explanations. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that PromptExplainer outperforms state-of-the-art explanation methods. |
LLM4Vis: Explainable Visualization Recommendation using ChatGPT (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform visualization recommendation require a large corpus of dataset-visualization pairs for training and lack natural explanations for their results. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that uses a ChatGPT-based prompting approach to perform visualization recommendation and return human-like explanations using very few demonstration examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms or performs similarly to supervised learning models like Random Forest, Decision Tree, and MLP, in both few-shot and zero-shot settings. |
Enhancing Multi-party Dialogue Discourse Parsing with Explanation Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-party dialogue discourse parsing is an important and challenging task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to integrate external knowledge from Large Language Models to analyze dialogue discourse structures and semantic relations between utterances in multi-party conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on two public datasets. |
When Backdoors Speak: Understanding LLM Backdoor Attacks Through Model-Generated Explanations (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where triggers embedded in poisoned data can maliciously alter LLMs’ behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage LLMs' generative capabilities to generate human-readable explanations for their decisions, enabling direct comparisons between explanations of clean and poisoned data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces coherent explanations for clean inputs but logically flawed explanations on poisoned data. |
From Detection to Explanation: Effective Learning Strategies for LLMs in Online Abusive Language Research (2025.coling-main)
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Chiara Di Bonaventura, Lucia Siciliani, Pierpaolo Basile, Albert Merono Penuela, Barbara McGillivray
| Challenge: | Abusive language detection requires commonsense reasoning, world knowledge and linguistic nuances that evolve over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-guided version of Llama-2 instruction fine-tuned for multi-class abusive language detection and explanation generation that mitigates bias and generates explanations that are relevant to the text and coherent with human reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model mitigates bias and generates explanations that are relevant to the text and coherent with human reasoning, with an average 48.76% better alignment with human judgment. |
Calibrating Trust of Multi-Hop Question Answering Systems with Decompositional Probes (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in multi-hop QA has shown that performance can be boosted by decomposing questions into simpler, single-hop questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose multi-hop questions into simpler, single-hop ones to create explanations by probing a neural QA model with them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be used to generate explanations by probing a neural QA model with them. |
MEVER: Multi-Modal and Explainable Claim Verification with Graph-based Evidence Retrieval (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for verification of claims rely on textual evidence only or ignore the explainability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal reasoning model that integrates text and visual evidence for verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves evidence retrieval, multi-modal claim verification, and explanation generation. |
Faithfully Explainable Recommendation via Neural Logic Reasoning (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for explainable recommendation have neglected faithfulness of KG reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose to draw on interpretable logical rules to guide path-reasoning process for explanation generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method delivers high-quality recommendations and ascertains the faithfulness of the derived explanation. |
Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing CRSs can be highly persuasive, but they can be deceptive and can damage the long-term trust between users and the CRS. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the credibility of CRS’s explanations by using a set of credibility-aware persuasive strategies and a post-hoc self-reflection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances the credibility of CRS’s explanations and refines them via post-hoc self-reflection. |
Learning to Generate Explanation from e-Hospital Services for Medical Suggestion (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural models have shown remarkable success in various tasks, however, simply offering the predictions may not satisfy the requirement of end-users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model which generates a medical suggestion and provides an explanation as the outline of the reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves promising performances in both quantitative and human evaluation. |
ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanations (2022.emnlp-main)
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Jiao Sun, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Alessandra Cervone, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Yang Liu, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Puns add the challenge of fusing commonsense and world knowledge with the ability to interpret lexical-semantic ambiguity. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment existing datasets with detailed crowdsourced annotations of puns, keywords and fine-grained funniness ratings to challenge current models' ability to understand and generate humor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks include explanation generation to aid with pun classification and keyword-conditioned pun generation to challenge state-of-the-art models' ability to understand and generate humor. |
Which Linguist Invented the Lightbulb? Presupposition Verification for Question-Answering (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Question-Answering (QA) datasets contain unanswerable questions . however, their treatment in QA systems remains primitive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides answers based on presupposition failure over oracle behavior of existing QA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides responses based on presupposition failure over oracle behavior of existing QA systems. |
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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Jiangjie Chen, Rui Xu, Ziquan Fu, Wei Shi, Zhongqiao Li, Xinbo Zhang, Changzhi Sun, Lei Li, Yanghua Xiao, Hao Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose an explanation benchmark for analogical reasoning using a Civil Service exam . they use a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is very challenging for state-of-the-art models, it is found. |
ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets. |
EX-FEVER: A Dataset for Multi-hop Explainable Fact Verification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on fact verification lack a high-quality dataset for explainability . existing systems lack evidence retrieval and veracity prediction, limiting the ability to verify a claim . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for multi-hop explainable fact verification that summarises and modifies Wikipedia documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset aims to improve the accuracy of multi-hop explainable fact verification systems. |
Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a few blind spots exist in the state-of-the-art in fact-checking for political claims. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 11.8K claims to explain fact-check labels for claims . they define and evaluate three coherence properties of explanation quality with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained on in-domain data and evaluates its coherence properties with humans and computationally. |
HealthFC: Verifying Health Claims with Evidence-Based Medical Fact-Checking (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | determining the trustworthiness of online medical content is challenging in the digital age . fact-checking is an approach to assess the veracity of factual claims . a new dataset is presented to help advance automated fact- checking . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that assesses the veracity of factual claims using evidence from credible sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used for automated fact-checking tasks. |
COFFEE: Counterfactual Fairness for Personalized Text Generation in Explainable Recommendation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Nan Wang, Qifan Wang, Yi-Chia Wang, Maziar Sanjabi, Jingzhou Liu, Hamed Firooz, Hongning Wang, Shaoliang Nie
| Challenge: | Personalized text generation (PTG) is a key component of our digital lives but can inadvertently associate different levels of linguistic quality with users’ protected attributes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to achieve measure-specific counterfactual fairness in explanation generation by focusing on one of the most studied settings: generating natural language explanations for recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves measure-specific counterfactual fairness in explanation generation. |
BANMIME : Misogyny Detection with Metaphor Explanation on Bangla Memes (2025.emnlp-main)
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Md Ayon Mia, Akm Moshiur Rahman Mazumder, Khadiza Sultana Sayma, Md Fahim, Md Tahmid Hasan Fuad, Muhammad Ibrahim Khan, Akmmahbubur Rahman
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored hate speech and general meme classification, but the nuanced identification of misogyny in Bangla memes remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bangla misogynistic meme dataset that includes misos, humor, metaphors and detailed human-written explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first comprehensive dataset of misogynistic Bangla memes . it includes misos, humor categories, metaphor localization, and detailed human-written explanations based on 2,000 culturally grounded samples . |
MemeIntel: Explainable Detection of Propagandistic and Hateful Memes (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for label detection and explanation generation have been limited in understanding complex issues . identifying propaganda and hate in memes is essential for combating misinformation and minimizing harm . |
| Approach: | They propose an explanation-enhanced dataset for propaganda memes in Arabic and hateful memes on English to solve these tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art in label detection and explanation generation. |
LiTEx: A Linguistic Taxonomy of Explanations for Understanding Within-Label Variation in Natural Language Inference (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence of human label variation in Natural Language Inference (NLI) however, within-label variation is an additional challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistically-informed taxonomy for categorizing free-text explanations in English that captures different reasoning strategies behind NLI explanations with a particular focus on within-label variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy can be used to classify explanations in English using a linguistically-informed taxonomies. |
Beyond Evidence: Belief-Chain Conditioning for Persuasive Misinformation Debunking Explanation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to misinformation correction focus on relying on audience beliefs to generate factually accurate responses and to engage with users' mental states. |
| Approach: | They construct large language models with cognitive chains and use them to model their outputs on beliefs that engage with users' mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves explanation quality for audiences with misinformation-aligned beliefs by incorporating believers’ chains into the model. |
Explaining Sources of Uncertainty in Automated Fact-Checking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to explain model uncertainty as numbers or hedges do not reveal which evidence conflicts cause the uncertainty, leaving users unable to resolve disagreements. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that generates natural-language explanations of model uncertainty grounded in conflicting/agreeing evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates explanations that more faithfully track model uncertainty and better align with the model’s fact-checking decisions than span-agnostic explanation prompting. |