# Explainability in Practice: A Survey of Explainable NLP Across Various Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00837 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00837/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 134 of its 285 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 134)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08600/) (2023)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13702/) (2023)
- [Designing and Interpreting Probes with Control Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03368/) (2019)
- [Attention is not not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04626/) (2019)
- [Towards Faithfully Interpretable NLP Systems: How should we define and evaluate faithfulness?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03685/) (2020)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03429/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10523/) (2025)
- [ADVICE: Answer-Dependent Verbalized Confidence Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10913/) (2025)
- [EvalMORAAL: Interpretable Chain-of-Thought and LLM-as-Judge Evaluation for Moral Alignment in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05942/) (2025)
- [Do Large Language Models Understand Morality Across Cultures?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21319/) (2025)
- [Explainability-Based Token Replacement on LLM-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04050/) (2025)
- [Exploring Cultural Variations in Moral Judgments with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12433/) (2025)
- [Towards Transparent AI: A Survey on Explainable Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21631/) (2025)
- [Concept Layers: Enhancing Interpretability and Intervenability via LLM Conceptualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13632/) (2025)
- [Conceptual Contrastive Edits in Textual and Vision-Language Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01914/) (2025)
- [A Computational Framework to Identify Self-Aspects in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13115/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Explainable AI Attribution Methods in Neural Machine Translation via Attention-Guided Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11342/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is now embedded in critical sectors including healthcare, finance, and customer relationship management, where models such as GPT-4o, Gemini, and BERT increasingly inform decisions. The black-box nature of these models has created an urgent need for transparency. This review examines explainable NLP (XNLP) as it is actually deployed, working through seven application domains: medicine, finance, systematic reviews, customer relationship management, chatbots, social and behavioral science, and human resources. For each domain, we ask what kind of explanation the setting needs, which methods are used there, and how they are evaluated. A structured cross-domain synthesis then contrasts how those requirements diverge. We compare the main explanation method families on scope, evidence of faithfulness, and computational cost. We also propose a two-tier evaluation protocol that separates a shared technical core of metrics from the domain-specific validation layer through which those metrics have to be read. The review also addresses areas that remain underrepresented in the XNLP literature, including real-world applicability, the gap between fidelity and faithfulness, and the role of human judgment in assessing explanations. It closes with research directions, among them personalized explanations, human-in-the-loop evaluation, and mechanistic interpretability for large language models.