Research into automatic text simplification aims to promote access to information for all members of society. To facilitate generalizability, simplification research often abstracts away from specific use cases, and targets a prototypical reader and an underspecified content creator. In this paper, we consider a real-world use case – simplification technology for use in Dutch municipalities – and identify the needs of the content creators and the target audiences in this scenario. The stakeholders envision a system that (a) assists the human writer without taking over the task; (b) provides diverse outputs, tailored for specific target audiences; and (c) explains the suggestions that it outputs. These requirements call for technology that is characterized by modularity, explainability, and variability. We argue that these are important research directions that require further exploration
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11/14/2024Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide insights into the inner workings and the outputs of AI systems. Recently, there’s been growing recognition that explainability is inherently human-centric, tied to how people perceive explanations. Despite this, there is no consensus in the research community on whether user evaluation is crucial in XAI, and if so, what exactly needs to be evaluated and how. This systematic literature review addresses this gap by providing a detailed overview of the current state of affairs in human-centered XAI evaluation. We reviewed 73 papers across various domains where XAI was evaluated with users. These studies assessed what makes an explanation “good” from a user’s perspective, i.e., what makes an explanation meaningful to a user of an AI system. We identified 30 components of meaningful explanations that were evaluated in the reviewed papers and categorized them into a taxonomy of human-centered XAI evaluation, based on: (a) the contextualized quality of the explanation, (b) the contribution of the explanation to human-AI interaction, and (c) the contribution of the explanation to human- AI performance. Our analysis also revealed a lack of standardization in the methodologies applied in XAI user studies, with only 19 of the 73 papers applying an evaluation framework used by at least one other study in the sample. These inconsistencies hinder cross-study comparisons and broader insights. Our findings contribute to understanding what makes explanations meaningful to users and how to measure this, guiding the XAI community toward a more unified approach in human-centered explainability.
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10/16/2024One aspect of a responsible application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is ensuring that the operation and outputs of an AI system are understandable for non-technical users, who need to consider its recommendations in their decision making. The importance of explainable AI (XAI) is widely acknowledged; however, its practical implementation is not straightforward. In particular, it is still unclear what the requirements are of non-technical users from explanations, i.e. what makes an explanation meaningful. In this paper, we synthesize insights on meaningful explanations from a literature study and two use cases in the financial sector. We identified 30 components of meaningfulness in XAI literature. In addition, we report three themes associated with explanation needs that were central to the users in our use cases, but are not prominently described in literature: actionability, coherent narratives and context. Our results highlight the importance of narrowing the gap between theoretical and applied responsible AI.
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06/09/2024
