While recent advancements in Neural Ranking Models have resulted in significant improvements over traditional statistical retrieval models, it is generally acknowledged that the use of large neural architectures and the application of complex language models in Information Retrieval (IR) have reduced the transparency of retrieval methods. Consequently, Explainability and Interpretability have emerged as important research topics in IR. Several axiomatic and post-hoc explanation methods, as well as approaches that attempt to be interpretable-by-design, have been proposed. We present ir_explain, an open-source Python library that implements a variety of well-known techniques for Explainable IR (ExIR) within a common, extensible framework. It supports the three standard categories of post-hoc explanations, namely pointwise, pairwise, and listwise explanations. The library is designed to make it easy to reproduce state-of-the-art ExIR baselines on standard test collections, as well as to explore new approaches to explaining IR models and methods. To facilitate adoption, ir_explain is well-integrated with widely-used toolkits such as Pyserini, PyTerrier (work in progress) and ir_datasets. Downstream applications of ir_explain include explaining the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline. The development version of the library is available on GitHub. We release the library as a pip package (https://pypi.org/project/ir-explain/); source code is available from https://github.com/souravsaha/ir_explain.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense advances in a wide range of natural language tasks. However, these models are susceptible to hallucinations and errors on particularly temporal understanding tasks involving multiple entities in answers. In such tasks, they fail to associate entities with accurate time intervals, generate a complete list of entities in answers or reason about events associated with specific temporal bounds. Existing works do not extensively evaluate the abilities of the model to perform implicit and explicit temporal understanding in a list answer construction setup. To bridge this gap, we propose the Time referenced List based Question Answering or TLQA benchmark that requires structured answers in list format aligned with corresponding time periods. Our TLQA benchmark, requires both list construction and temporal understanding simultaneously, which to the best of our knowledge has not been explored in prior benchmarks. We investigate the temporal understanding and list construction capabilities of state-of-the-art generative models on TLQA in closed-book and open-domain settings. Our findings reveal significant shortcomings in current models, particularly their inability to provide complete answers and temporally align facts in a closed-book setup and the need to improve retrieval in open-domain setup, providing clear future directions for research on TLQA. The benchmark and code can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/elixir-research-group/TLQA.

The CheckThat! lab aims to advance the development of innovative technologies designed to identify and to counteract online disinformation and manipulation efforts across various languages and platforms. The first five editions of the CheckThat! lab focused on the main tasks of the information verification pipeline: check-worthiness, evidence retrieval and pairing, and verification. Since the 2023 edition, the lab has broadened the focus and addressed new problems on auxiliary tasks supporting research and decision-making during the verification process. In the 2025 edition of the lab, we consider tasks at the core of the verification pipeline again as well as auxiliary tasks: Task 1 is on identification of subjectivity (a follow up of the CheckThat! 2024 edition), Task 2 is on claim normalization, Task 3 addresses fact-checking numerical claims, and Task 4 focuses on scientific web discourse processing. These tasks represent challenging classification and retrieval problems at the document and at the span level, including multilingual settings.

With the growth of misinformation on the web, automated fact checking has garnered immense interest for detecting growing misinformation and disinformation. Current systems have made significant advancements in handling synthetic claims sourced from Wikipedia, and noteworthy progress has been achieved in addressing real-world claims that are verified by fact-checking organizations as well. We compile and release QuanTemp, a diverse, multi-domain dataset focused exclusively on numerical claims, encompassing comparative, statistical, interval, and temporal aspects, with detailed metadata and an accompanying evidence collection. This addresses the challenge of verifying real-world numerical claims, which are complex and often lack precise information, a gap not filled by existing works that mainly focus on synthetic claims. We evaluate and quantify these gaps in existing solutions for the task of verifying numerical claims. We also evaluate claim decomposition based methods, numerical understanding based natural language inference (NLI) models and our best baselines achieves a macro-F1 of 58.32. This demonstrates that QuanTemp serves as a challenging evaluation set for numerical claim verification.

Online learning systems have multiple data repositories in the form of transcripts, books and questions. To enable ease of access, such systems organize the content according to a well defined taxonomy of hierarchical nature (subject - chapter -topic). The task of categorizing inputs to the hierarchical labels is usually cast as a flat multi-class classification problem. Such approaches ignore the semantic relatedness between the terms in the input and the tokens in the hierarchical labels. Alternate approaches also suffer from class imbalance when they only consider leaf level nodes as labels. To tackle the issues, we formulate the task as a dense retrieval problem to retrieve the appropriate hierarchical labels for each content. In this paper, we deal with categorizing questions and learning content. We model the hierarchical labels as a composition of their tokens and use an efficient cross-attention mechanism to fuse the information with the term representations of the content. We also adopt an adaptive in-batch hard negative sampling approach which samples better negatives as the training progresses. We demonstrate that the proposed approach TagRec++ outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on question and learning content datasets as measured by Recall@k. In addition, we demonstrate zero-shot capabilities of TagRec++ and preliminary analysis of it's ability to adapt to label changes.