{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/towards-feasible-counterfactual-explanations","title":"Towards Feasible Counterfactual Explanations: A Taxonomy Guided Template-based NLG Method","arxiv_id":"2310.02019","date":"2023-10-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Pedram Salimi","Nirmalie Wiratunga","David Corsar","Anjana Wijekoon"],"abstract":"Counterfactual Explanations (cf-XAI) describe the smallest changes in feature values necessary to change an outcome from one class to another. However, many cf-XAI methods neglect the feasibility of those changes. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for presenting cf-XAI in natural language (Natural-XAI), giving careful consideration to actionable and comprehensible aspects while remaining cognizant of immutability and ethical concerns. We present three contributions to this endeavor. Firstly, through a user study, we identify two types of themes present in cf-XAI composed by humans: content-related, focusing on how features and their values are included from both the counterfactual and the query perspectives; and structure-related, focusing on the structure and terminology used for describing necessary value changes. Secondly, we introduce a feature actionability taxonomy with four clearly defined categories, to streamline the explanation presentation process. Using insights from the user study and our taxonomy, we created a generalisable template-based natural language generation (NLG) method compatible with existing explainers like DICE, NICE, and DisCERN, to produce counterfactuals that address the aforementioned limitations of existing approaches. Finally, we conducted a second user study to assess the performance of our taxonomy-guided NLG templates on three domains. Our findings show that the taxonomy-guided Natural-XAI approach (n-XAI^T) received higher user ratings across all dimensions, with significantly improved results in the majority of the domains assessed for articulation, acceptability, feasibility, and sensitivity dimensions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02019v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.02019v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"towards-feasible-counterfactual-explanations","repo_url":"https://github.com/pedramsalimi/nlgxai","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"affine-coupling","method_name":"Affine Coupling"},{"method_slug":"counterfactuals","method_name":"Counterfactuals"},{"method_slug":"nice","method_name":"NICE"},{"method_slug":"normalizing-flows","method_name":"Normalizing Flows"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}