Events

NLP/Text-As-Data Speaker Series: Towards Human-Centered Explanations of AI Predictions

Speaker: Chenhao Tan

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 7th Floor Open Space

Date: Thursday, March 10, 2022

Explanations of AI predictions are considered crucial for human-AI interactions such as model debugging and model-assisted decision making, but it remains an open question what makes effective AI explanations. In this talk, I will highlight the distinction between emulation and discovery tasks, which shapes the answers to this question. In emulation tasks, humans provide groundtruth labels and the goal of AI is to emulate human intelligence. However, humans may not be able to provide "good" explanations. Despite the growing efforts in building datasets of human explanations, caution is required to use such human explanations for evaluation or as supervision signals. In contrast, in discovery tasks, humans may not necessarily know the groundtruth label. While human-subject experiments are increasingly used to evaluate whether explanations improve human decisions, human+AI rarely outperforms AI alone. I will discuss the importance of identifying human strengths and AI strengths, and present our initial efforts in decision-focused summarization. I will conclude with future directions for developing effective human-centered explanations.