# ExDDI: Explaining Drug-Drug Interaction Predictions with Natural Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [e-SNLI: Natural Language Inference with Natural Language Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01193/) (2018)
- [Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02361/) (2019)
- [Can language models learn from explanations in context?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02329/) (2022)
- [WT5?! Training Text-to-Text Models to Explain their Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14546/) (2020)
- [Distilling ChatGPT for Explainable Automated Student Answer Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12962/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Case-Based Reasoning Enhances the Predictive Power of LLMs in Drug-Drug Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23034/) (2025)
- [MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12578/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting unknown drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is crucial for improving medication safety. Previous efforts in DDI prediction have typically focused on binary classification or predicting DDI categories, with the absence of explanatory insights that could enhance trust in these predictions. In this work, we propose to generate natural language explanations for DDI predictions, enabling the model to reveal the underlying pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics mechanisms simultaneously as making the prediction. To do this, we have collected DDI explanations from DDInter and DrugBank and developed various models for extensive experiments and analysis. Our models can provide accurate explanations for unknown DDIs between known drugs. This paper contributes new tools to the field of DDI prediction and lays a solid foundation for further research on generating explanations for DDI predictions.