Conversational Explanations of Machine Learning Predictions Through Class-contrastive Counterfactual Statements

Conversational Explanations of Machine Learning Predictions Through Class-contrastive Counterfactual Statements

Kacper Sokol, Peter Flach

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Doctoral Consortium. Pages 5785-5786. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/836

Machine learning models have become pervasive in our everyday life; they decide on important matters influencing our education, employment and judicial system. Many of these predictive systems are commercial products protected by trade secrets, hence their decision-making is opaque. Therefore, in our research we address interpretability and explainability of predictions made by machine learning models. Our work draws heavily on human explanation research in social sciences: contrastive and exemplar explanations provided through a dialogue. This user-centric design, focusing on a lay audience rather than domain experts, applied to machine learning allows explainees to drive the explanation to suit their needs instead of being served a precooked template.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Classification
Machine Learning: Machine Learning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Human-Computer Interaction
Natural Language Processing: Dialogue