Automated rationale generation is an approach for real-time explanation generation whereby a computational model learns to translate an autonomous agent's internal state and action data representations into natural language. Training on human explanation data can enable agents to learn to generate human-like explanations for their behavior. In this paper, using the context of an agent that plays Frogger, we describe (a) how to collect a corpus of explanations, (b) how to train a neural rationale generator to produce different styles of rationales, and (c) how people perceive these rationales. We conducted two user studies. The first study establishes the plausibility of each type of generated rationale and situates their user perceptions along the dimensions of confidence, humanlike-ness, adequate justification, and understandability. The second study further explores user preferences between the generated rationales with regard to confidence in the autonomous agent, communicating failure and unexpected behavior. Overall, we find alignment between the intended differences in features of the generated rationales and the perceived differences by users. Moreover, context permitting, participants preferred detailed rationales to form a stable mental model of the agent's behavior.
The dearth of established methods combined with the variable conceptions of explanations make evaluation of XAI systems challenging. @cite_24 use scenario-based survey design @cite_6 and presented different types of hypothetical explanations for the same decision to measure perceived levels of justice. One non-neural based network evaluates the usefulness and naturalness of generated explanations @cite_2 . @cite_29 use explanations manually generated from content analysis of Facebook's News Feed to study perceptions of algorithmic transparency. One key differentiating factor of our approach is that our evaluation is based rationales that are actual system outputs (compared to hypothetical ones). Moreover, user perceptions of our system's rationales directly influence the design of our rationale generation technique.
@cite_24 @cite_29 @cite_6 @cite_2
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There has recently been a surge of work in explanatory artificial intelligence (XAI). This research area tackles the important problem that complex machines and algorithms often cannot provide insights into their behavior and thought processes. XAI allows users and parts of the internal system to be more transparent, providing explanations of their decisions in some level of detail. These explanations are important to ensure algorithmic fairness, identify potential bias problems in the training data, and to ensure that the algorithms perform as expected. However, explanations produced by these systems is neither standardized nor systematically assessed. In an effort to create best practices and identify open challenges, we describe foundational concepts of explainability and show how they can be used to classify existing literature. We discuss why current approaches to explanatory methods especially for deep neural networks are insufficient. Finally, based on our survey, we conclude with suggested future research directions for explanatory artificial intelligence. Most previous work on trainable language generation has focused on two paradigms: (a) using a generation decisions of an existing generator. Both approaches rely on the existence of a handcrafted generation component, which is likely to limit their scalability to new domains. The first contribution of this article is to present Bagel, a fully data-driven generation method that treats the language generation task as a search for the most likely sequence of semantic concepts and realization phrases, according to Factored Language Models (FLMs). As domain utterances are not readily available for most natural language generation tasks, a large creative effort is required to produce the data necessary to represent human linguistic variation for nontrivial domains. This article is based on the assumption that learning to produce paraphrases can be facilitated by collecting data from a large sample of untrained annotators using crowdsourcing—rather than a few domain experts—by relying on a coarse meaning representation. A second contribution of this article is to use crowdsourced data to show how dialogue naturalness can be improved by learning to vary the output utterances generated for a given semantic input. Two data-driven methods for generating paraphrases in dialogue are presented: (a) by sampling from the n-best list of realizations produced by Bagel's FLM reranker; and (b) by learning a structured perceptron predicting whether candidate realizations are valid paraphrases. We train Bagel on a set of 1,956 utterances produced by 137 annotators, which covers 10 types of dialogue acts and 128 semantic concepts in a tourist information system for Cambridge. An automated evaluation shows that Bagel outperforms utterance class LM baselines on this domain. A human evaluation of 600 resynthesized dialogue extracts shows that Bagel's FLM output produces utterances comparable to a handcrafted baseline, whereas the perceptron classifier performs worse. Interestingly, human judges find the system sampling from the n-best list to be more natural than a system always returning the first-best utterance. The judges are also more willing to interact with the n-best system in the future. These results suggest that capturing the large variation found in human language using data-driven methods is beneficial for dialogue interaction. The recent years have witnessed the rise of accurate but obscure decision systems which hide the logic of their internal decision processes to the users. The lack of explanations for the decisions of black box systems is a key ethical issue, and a limitation to the adoption of machine learning components in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. Therefore, we need explanations that reveals the reasons why a predictor takes a certain decision. In this paper we focus on the problem of black box outcome explanation, i.e., explaining the reasons of the decision taken on a specific instance. We propose LORE, an agnostic method able to provide interpretable and faithful explanations. LORE first leans a local interpretable predictor on a synthetic neighborhood generated by a genetic algorithm. Then it derives from the logic of the local interpretable predictor a meaningful explanation consisting of: a decision rule, which explains the reasons of the decision; and a set of counterfactual rules, suggesting the changes in the instance's features that lead to a different outcome. Wide experiments show that LORE outperforms existing methods and baselines both in the quality of explanations and in the accuracy in mimicking the black box. Existing visual explanation generating agents learn to fluently justify a class prediction. However, they may mention visual attributes which reflect a strong class prior, although the evidence may not actually be in the image. This is particularly concerning as ultimately such agents fail in building trust with human users. To overcome this limitation, we propose a phrase-critic model to refine generated candidate explanations augmented with flipped phrases which we use as negative examples while training. At inference time, our phrase-critic model takes an image and a candidate explanation as input and outputs a score indicating how well the candidate explanation is grounded in the image. Our explainable AI agent is capable of providing counter arguments for an alternative prediction, i.e. counterfactuals, along with explanations that justify the correct classification decisions. Our model improves the textual explanation quality of fine-grained classification decisions on the CUB dataset by mentioning phrases that are grounded in the image. Moreover, on the FOIL tasks, our agent detects when there is a mistake in the sentence, grounds the incorrect phrase and corrects it significantly better than other models.