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A Study of Explainability Features to Scrutinize Faceted Filtering Results

Faceted search systems enable users to filter results by selecting values along different dimensions or facets. Traditionally, facets have corresponded to properties of information items that are part of the document metadata. Recently, faceted search systems have begun to use machine learning to automatically associate documents with facet-values that are more subjective and abstract. Examples include search systems that support topic-based filtering of research articles, concept-based filtering of medical documents, and tag-based filtering of images. While machine learning can be used to infer facet-values when the collection is too large for manual annotation, machine-learned classifiers make mistakes. In such cases, it is desirable to have a scrutable system that explains why a filtered result is relevant to a facet-value. Such explanations are missing from current systems. In this paper, we investigate how explainability features can help users interpret results filtered using machine-learned facets. We consider two explainability features: (1) showing prediction confidence values and (2) highlighting rationale sentences that played an influential role in predicting a facet-value. We report on a crowdsourced study involving 200 participants. Participants were asked to scrutinize movie plot summaries predicted to satisfy multiple genres and indicate their agreement or disagreement with the system. Participants were exposed to four interface conditions. We found that both explainability features had a positive impact on participants' perceptions and performance. While both features helped, the sentence-highlighting feature played a more instrumental role in enabling participants to reject false positive cases. We discuss implications for designing tools to help users scrutinize automatically assigned facet-values.