What is it about?

We investigated a collection of questions (XAI question bank from Liao et al.), that focuses the needs of users. This serves to better understand what actual end-users need to understand the AI tool they are working with and to operate it correctly. We tested the question bank with experts, i.e., art historians. We identified additional needed question for example regarding UI, information about the output of the AI and others. Also, we provide definitions to the questions and recommend to discuss the question bank in detail with colleagues before using it to identify users' needs.

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Why is it important?

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) attempts to make the decisions of AI systems interpretable to humans. Explanations are mostly developed by AI experts and focus on algorithmic transparency and the inner workings of AI systems. Research has shown that such explanations do not meet the needs of users who do not have AI expertise. As a result, explanations are often ineffective in making system decisions interpretable and understandable. We aim to strengthen a socio-technical view of AI by following a Human-Centered Explainable Artificial Intelligence (HC-XAI) approach, which investigates the explanation needs of end-users (i.e., art historians) in specific usage contexts.

Perspectives

I hope this article is a conversation starter. Many tools such as the XAI Question Bank are extremely valuable, useful and widely referenced. That is why studies that seem critical - like our study - are important. Not to complain, but to keep the standard of research high and to refine existing methods. We are pleased that the community is so interested in the needs of users and hope that our publication will further strengthen this trend.

Ulrike Schaefer
Freie Universitat Berlin

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Identifying Explanation Needs of End-users: Applying and Extending the XAI Question Bank, September 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3603555.3608551.
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