Why These Documents? Explainable Generative Retrieval with Hierarchical Category Paths

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission1094 Authors

Abstract:

Generative retrieval directly decode a document identifier (i.e., docid) in response to a query, making it impossible to provide users with explanations as an answer for ``why is this document retrieved?''.
To address this limitation, we propose Hierarchical Category Path-Enhanced Generative Retrieval (HyPE), which enhances explainability by first generating hierarchical category paths step-by-step then decoding docid.
By leveraging hierarchical category paths which progress from broader to more specific semantic categories, HyPE can provide detailed explanation for its retrieval decision.
For training, HyPE constructs category paths with external high-quality semantic hierarchy, leverages LLM to select appropriate candidate paths for each document, and optimizes the generative retrieval model with path-augmented dataset.
During inference, HyPE utilizes path-aware ranking strategy to aggregate diverse topic information, allowing the most relevant documents to be prioritized in the final ranked list of docids.
Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HyPE not only offers a high level of explainability but also improves the retrieval performance.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: NLP Applications

Research Area Keywords: generative retrieval,explainability

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1094