Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

System Explanations: A Cautionary Tale

Published

Author(s)

Ellen M. Voorhees

Abstract

There are increasing calls for systems that are able to explain themselves to their end users to increase transparency and help engender trust. But, what should such explanations contain, and how should that information be presented? A pilot study of justifications produced by textual entailment systems serves as a cautionary tale that there are no general answers to these questions. Six different judges each acting in the role of surrogate end-user independently rated how comprehensible justifications of entailment decisions were on a five-point scale. Interrater agreement was low, with an intra-class correlation of about 0.4. More than half of the explanations received both one rating of 'Very Poor' or 'Poor' and one rating of 'Good' or 'Very Good'; and in 32 cases, the same explanation received all five possible ratings from 'Very Poor' through 'Very Good'.
Proceedings Title
ACM CHI 2021 workshop on Operationalizing Human-centered Perspectives in Explainable AI (HCXAI'21)
Conference Dates
May 8-14, 2021
Conference Location
virtual, but nominally in Yokohama, JP

Keywords

explanation, human ratings, textual entailment

Citation

Voorhees, E. (2021), System Explanations: A Cautionary Tale, ACM CHI 2021 workshop on Operationalizing Human-centered Perspectives in Explainable AI (HCXAI'21), virtual, but nominally in Yokohama, JP, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=932212 (Accessed November 3, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created May 8, 2021, Updated February 14, 2023