Human-grounded evaluations of explanation methods for text classification

Due to the black-box nature of deep learning models, methods for explaining the models’ results are crucial to gain trust from humans and support collaboration between AIs and humans. In this paper, we consider several model-agnostic and model-specific explanation methods for CNNs for text classification and conduct three human-grounded evaluations, focusing on different purposes of explanations: (1) revealing model behavior, (2) justifying model predictions, and (3) helping humans investigate uncertain predictions. The results highlight dissimilar qualities of the various explanation methods we consider and show the degree to which these methods could serve for each purpose

The right kind of explanation: Validity in automated hate speech detection

To quickly identify hate speech online, communication research offers a useful tool in the form of automatic content analysis. However, the combined methods of standardized manual content analysis and supervised text classification demand different quality criteria. This chapter shows that a more substantial examination of validity is necessary since models often learn on spurious correlations or biases, and researchers run the risk of drawing wrong inferences. To investigate the overlap of theoretical concepts with technological operationalization, explainability methods are evaluated to explain what a model has learned. These methods proved to be of limited use in testing the validity of a model when the generated explanations aim at sense-making rather than faithfulness to the model. The chapter ends with recommendations for further interdisciplinary development of automatic content analysis

A Symmetric Loss Perspective of Reliable Machine Learning

When minimizing the empirical risk in binary classification, it is a common practice to replace the zero-one loss with a surrogate loss to make the learning objective feasible to optimize. Examples of well-known surrogate losses for binary classification include the logistic loss, hinge loss, and sigmoid loss. It is known that the choice of a surrogate loss can highly influence the performance of the trained classifier and therefore it should be carefully chosen. Recently, surrogate losses that satisfy a certain symmetric condition (aka., symmetric losses) have demonstrated their usefulness in learning from corrupted labels. In this article, we provide an overview of symmetric losses and their applications. First, we review how a symmetric loss can yield robust classification from corrupted labels in balanced error rate (BER) minimization and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) maximization. Then, we demonstrate how the robust AUC maximization method can benefit natural language processing in the problem where we want to learn only from relevant keywords and unlabeled documents. Finally, we conclude this article by discussing future directions, including potential applications of symmetric losses for reliable machine learning and the design of non-symmetric losses that can benefit from the symmetric condition.Comment: Preprint of an Invited Review Articl

Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research

A Multidisciplinary Design and Evaluation Framework for Explainable AI Systems

Nowadays, algorithms analyze user data and affect the decision-making process for millions of people on matters like employment, insurance and loan rates, and even criminal justice. However, these algorithms that serve critical roles in many industries have their own biases that can result in discrimination and unfair decision-making. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems can be a solution to predictable and accountable AI by explaining AI decision-making processes for end users and therefore increase user awareness and prevent bias and discrimination. The broad spectrum of research on XAI, including designing interpretable models, explainable user interfaces, and human-subject studies of XAI systems are sought in different disciplines such as machine learning, human-computer interactions (HCI), and visual analytics. The mismatch in objectives for the scholars to define, design, and evaluate the concept of XAI may slow down the overall advances of end-to-end XAI systems. My research aims to converge knowledge behind design and evaluation of XAI systems between multiple disciplines to further support key benefits of algorithmic transparency and interpretability. To this end, I propose a comprehensive design and evaluation framework for XAI systems with step-by-step guidelines to pair different design goals with their evaluation methods for iterative system design cycles in multidisciplinary teams. This dissertation presents a comprehensive XAI design and evaluation framework to provide guidance for different design goals and evaluation approaches in XAI systems. After a thorough review of XAI research in the fields of machine learning, visualization, and HCI, I present a categorization of XAI design goals and evaluation methods and show a mapping between design goals for different XAI user groups and their evaluation methods. From my findings, I present a design and evaluation framework for XAI systems (Objective 1) to address the relation between different system design needs. The framework provides recommendations for different goals and ready-to-use tables of evaluation methods for XAI systems. The importance of this framework is in providing guidance for researchers on different aspects of XAI system design in multidisciplinary team efforts. Then, I demonstrate and validate the proposed framework (Objective 2) through one end-to-end XAI system case study and two examples by analysis of previous XAI systems in terms of our framework. I present two contributions to my XAI design and evaluation framework to improve evaluation methods for XAI system