metadata

pretty_name: ELI-Why Manually Web-Retrieved Explanations
language:
  - en
license: mit
tags:
  - education
  - explainability
  - question-answering
  - retrieval
  - pedagogy
dataset_info:
  features:
    - name: Question
      dtype: string
    - name: Domain
      dtype: string
    - name: Topic
      dtype: string
    - name: Explanation
      dtype: string
    - name: Intended Educational Background
      dtype: string
    - name: Source
      dtype: string
  splits:
    - name: train
      num_examples: 123
annotations_creators:
  - expert-verified
source_datasets:
  - original
multilinguality:
  - monolingual
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
citation: |
  @inproceedings{joshi2025eliwhy,
    title={{ELI-Why}: Evaluating the Pedagogical Utility of Language Model Explanations},
    author={Joshi, Brihi and He, Keyu and Ramnath, Sahana and Sabouri, Sadra and Zhou, Kaitlyn and Chattopadhyay, Souti and Swayamdipta, Swabha and Ren, Xiang},
    year={2025}
  }

📚 ELI-Why Manually Web-Retrieved Explanations

🧠 Dataset Summary

This dataset contains high-quality, manually curated explanations for "Why" questions, retrieved from the web to serve as educationally appropriate references.
Each explanation is annotated with:

A corresponding question
A fine-grained topic and domain label (e.g., STEM / Physics)
The intended educational level (Elementary, High School, Graduate)
The original source URL from which the explanation was retrieved

The explanations were selected by human annotators for clarity, correctness, and pedagogical value for the target educational level.

📦 Dataset Structure

Each row contains:

Question: The "Why" question
Domain: "STEM" or "Non-STEM"
Topic: More specific subject area (e.g., "Physics", "Sociology")
Explanation: The full retrieved explanation (manually copied)
Intended Educational Background: One of ["Elementary", "High School", "Graduate School"]
Source: URL of the original explanation

🔍 Example

{
  "Question": "Why is the sky blue?",
  "Domain": "STEM",
  "Topic": "Physics",
  "Explanation": "If you stick your hand out of the car window when it's moving...",
  "Intended Educational Background": "Elementary",
  "Source": "https://example.com/sky-blue-explained"
}

📚 Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@inproceedings{joshi2025eliwhy,
  title={{ELI-Why}: Evaluating the Pedagogical Utility of Language Model Explanations},
  author={Joshi, Brihi and He, Keyu and Ramnath, Sahana and Sabouri, Sadra and Zhou, Kaitlyn and Chattopadhyay, Souti and Swayamdipta, Swabha and Ren, Xiang},
  year={2025}
}