---
license: mit
task_categories:
- text-classification
language:
- en
tags:
- 'rationale-extraction'
- reasoning
- nli
- fact-checking
- explainability
pretty_name: spanex
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K

configs:
- config_name: snli_extended
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: snli_extended.jsonl
- config_name: fever_extended
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: fever_extended.jsonl
- config_name: snli
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: snli.jsonl
- config_name: fever
  data_files:
  - split: test
    path: fever.jsonl
---

SpanEx consists of 7071 instances annotated for span interactions.
SpanEx is the first dataset with human phrase-level interaction explanations with explicit labels for interaction types. 
Moreover, SpanEx is annotated by three annotators, which opens new avenues for studies of human explanation agreement -- an understudied area in the explainability literature. 
Our study reveals that while human annotators often agree on span interactions, they also offer complementary reasons for a prediction, collectively providing a comprehensive set of reasons for a prediction.
We collect explanations of span interactions for NLI on the SNLI dataset and for FC on the FEVER dataset.

Please cite the following paper if you use this dataset:

```
@inproceedings{choudhury-etal-2023-explaining,
    title = "Explaining Interactions Between Text Spans",
    author = "Choudhury, Sagnik  and
      Atanasova, Pepa  and
      Augenstein, Isabelle",
    editor = "Bouamor, Houda  and
      Pino, Juan  and
      Bali, Kalika",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = dec,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Singapore",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.783",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.783",
    pages = "12709--12730",
    abstract = "Reasoning over spans of tokens from different parts of the input is essential for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks such as fact-checking (FC), machine reading comprehension (MRC) or natural language inference (NLI). However, existing highlight-based explanations primarily focus on identifying individual important features or interactions only between adjacent tokens or tuples of tokens. Most notably, there is a lack of annotations capturing the human decision-making process with respect to the necessary interactions for informed decision-making in such tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpanEx, a multi-annotator dataset of human span interaction explanations for two NLU tasks: NLI and FC. We then investigate the decision-making processes of multiple fine-tuned large language models in terms of the employed connections between spans in separate parts of the input and compare them to the human reasoning processes. Finally, we present a novel community detection based unsupervised method to extract such interaction explanations. We make the code and the dataset available on [Github](https://github.com/copenlu/spanex). The dataset is also available on [Huggingface datasets](https://huggingface.co/datasets/copenlu/spanex).",
}
```