by Jerome Ramos and Carsten Eickhoff
Search engines often provide only limited explanation on why results are ranked in a particular order. This lack of transparency prevents users from understanding results and can potentially give rise to biased or unfair systems. Opaque search engines may also hurt user trust in the presented ranking. This study presents an investigation of system quality when different degrees of explanation are provided on search engine result pages. Our user study demonstrates that the inclusion of even simplistic explanations leads to better transparency, increased user trust and better search efficiency.
This repository contains the complete codebase of the Web interface that was used to conduct and analyse our crowdsourced user study.
This paper appeared in ACM SIGIR 2020 and can be found here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3397271.3401279
A video recording of the conference talk is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNEqb2SGKbg
If you would like to cite this work, please refer to:
@INPROCEEDINGS{ramos2020search,
title={{Search Result Explanations Improve Efficiency and Trust}},
author={Ramos, Jerome and Eickhoff, Carsten},
booktitle={{Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR)}},
year={2020},
organization={ACM}
}