Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Proceedings of the Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext Systems

This report contains 9 papers presented at a workshop on version management and hypertext, as well as a summary introduction by the organizers. These papers address requirements, solutions, and research issues related to the management of hypertext databases. Version management is not only a key application requirement in some domains (like design journals and electronic manuals) but provides a way to preserve the integrity of links in a changing hyperbase

Where are your Manners? Sharing Best Community Practices in the Web 2.0

The Web 2.0 fosters the creation of communities by offering users a wide array of social software tools. While the success of these tools is based on their ability to support different interaction patterns among users by imposing as few limitations as possible, the communities they support are not free of rules (just think about the posting rules in a community forum or the editing rules in a thematic wiki). In this paper we propose a framework for the sharing of best community practices in the form of a (potentially rule-based) annotation layer that can be integrated with existing Web 2.0 community tools (with specific focus on wikis). This solution is characterized by minimal intrusiveness and plays nicely within the open spirit of the Web 2.0 by providing users with behavioral hints rather than by enforcing the strict adherence to a set of rules.Comment: ACM symposium on Applied Computing, Honolulu : \'Etats-Unis d'Am\'erique (2009

How to Quantify the Degree of Explainability: Experiments and Practical Implications

Explainable AI was born as a pathway to allow humans to explore and understand the inner working of complex systems. Though, establishing what is an explanation and objectively evaluating explainability, are not trivial tasks. With this paper, we present a new model-agnostic metric to measure the Degree of Explainability of (correct) information in an objective way, exploiting a specific theoretical model from Ordinary Language Philosophy called the Achinstein’s Theory of Explanations, implemented with an algorithm relying on deep language models for knowledge graph extraction and information retrieval. In order to understand whether this metric is actually behaving as explainability is expected to, we have devised an experiment on two realistic Explainable AI-based systems for healthcare and finance, using famous AI technology including Artificial Neural Networks and TreeSHAP. The results we obtained suggest that our proposed metric for measuring the Degree of Explainability is robust on several scenario

Generating User-Centred Explanations via Illocutionary Question Answering: From Philosophy to Interfaces

We propose a new method for generating explanations with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a tool to test its expressive power within a user interface. In order to bridge the gap between philosophy and human-computer interfaces, we show a new approach for the generation of interactive explanations based on a sophisticated pipeline of AI algorithms for structuring natural language documents into knowledge graphs, answering questions effectively and satisfactorily. With this work, we aim to prove that the philosophical theory of explanations presented by Achinstein can be actually adapted for being implemented into a concrete software application, as an interactive and illocutionary process of answering questions. Specifically, our contribution is an approach to frame illocution in a computer-friendly way, to achieve user-centrality with statistical question answering. Indeed, we frame the illocution of an explanatory process as that mechanism responsible for anticipating the needs of the explainee in the form of unposed, implicit, archetypal questions, hence improving the user-centrality of the underlying explanatory process. Therefore, we hypothesise that if an explanatory process is an illocutionary act of providing content-giving answers to questions, and illocution is as we defined it, the more explicit and implicit questions can be answered by an explanatory tool, the more usable (as per ISO 9241-210) its explanations. We tested our hypothesis with a user-study involving more than 60 participants, on two XAI-based systems, one for credit approval (finance) and one for heart disease prediction (healthcare). The results showed that increasing the illocutionary power of an explanatory tool can produce statistically significant improvements (hence with a P value lower than .05) on effectiveness. This, combined with a visible alignment between the increments in effectiveness and satisfaction, suggests that our understanding of illocution can be correct, giving evidence in favour of our theory

Explanatory artificial intelligence (YAI): human-centered explanations of explainable AI and complex data

In this paper we introduce a new class of software tools engaged in delivering successful explanations of complex processes on top of basic Explainable AI (XAI) software systems. These tools, that we call cumulatively Explanatory AI (YAI) systems, enhance the quality of the basic output of a XAI by adopting a user-centred approach to explanation that can cater to the individual needs of the explainees with measurable improvements in usability. Our approach is based on Achinstein’s theory of explanations, where explaining is an illocutionary (i.e., broad yet pertinent and deliberate) act of pragmatically answering a question. Accordingly, user-centrality enters in the equation by considering that the overall amount of information generated by answering all questions can rapidly become overwhelming and that individual users may perceive the need to explore just a few of them. In this paper, we give the theoretical foundations of YAI, formally defining a user-centred explanatory tool and the space of all possible explanations, or explanatory space, generated by it. To this end, we frame the explanatory space as an hypergraph of knowledge and we identify a set of heuristics and properties that can help approximating a decomposition of it into a tree-like representation for efficient and user-centred explanation retrieval. Finally, we provide some old and new empirical results to support our theory, showing that explanations are more than textual or visual presentations of the sole information provided by a XAI

Legal Knowledge Extraction for Knowledge Graph Based Question-Answering

This paper presents the Open Knowledge Extraction (OKE) tools combined with natural language analysis of the sentence in order to enrich the semantic of the legal knowledge extracted from legal text. In particular the use case is on international private law with specific regard to the Rome I Regulation EC 593/2008, Rome II Regulation EC 864/2007, and Brussels I bis Regulation EU 1215/2012. A Knowledge Graph (KG) is built using OKE and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods jointly with the main ontology design patterns defined for the legal domain (e.g., event, time, role, agent, right, obligations, jurisdiction). Using critical questions, underlined by legal experts in the domain, we have built a question answering tool capable to support the information retrieval and to answer to these queries. The system should help the legal expert to retrieve the relevant legal information connected with topics, concepts, entities, normative references in order to integrate his/her searching activities

Making Things Explainable vs Explaining: Requirements and Challenges Under the GDPR

open3noAbstract. The European Union (EU) through the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI-HLEG) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has recently posed an interesting challenge to the eXplainable AI (XAI) community, by demanding a more user-centred approach to explain Automated Decision-Making systems (ADMs). Looking at the relevant literature, XAI is currently focused on producing explainable software and explanations that generally follow an approach we could term One-Size-Fits-All, that is unable to meet a requirement of centring on user needs. One of the causes of this limit is the belief that making things explainable alone is enough to have pragmatic explanations. Thus, insisting on a clear separation between explainabilty (something that can be explained) and explanations, we point to explanatorY AI (YAI) as an alternative and more powerful approach to win the AI-HLEG challenge. YAI builds over XAI with the goal to collect and organize explainable information, articulating it into something we called user-centred explanatory discourses. Through the use of explanatory discourses/narratives we represent the problem of generating explanations for Automated Decision-Making systems (ADMs) into the identification of an appropriate path over an explanatory space, allowing explainees to interactively explore it and produce the explanation best suited to their needs.openSovrano, Francesco; Vitali, Fabio; Palmirani, MonicaSovrano, Francesco; Vitali, Fabio; Palmirani, Monic

Using XML as a means to access legislative documents: Italian and foreign experiences

In this paper we describe the goals and the organisation of the ongoing project "Norme in Rete" (NIR --- http://www.normeinrete.it), which involves several important Italian institutions and organisations. This project aims at the production of tools for the access to Italian normative documents, and data formats for the standardisation of the text of laws and rules both national and local. One of its many goals is the conversion of the national law corpus into XML.Within the context of this project, our effort has concentrated on the development of an XML DTD already, and of an XML Schema very soon, to describe Italian national and local laws. We illustrate in this paper the overall structure of the DTDs. They are organised in a stricter, normative set of rules, with normative power, for new law drafts, and of a looser, descriptive set of rules for existing documents over which no rules can be imposed. In this paper we examine both types of DTD (strict and loose), their global organisation, the modules for legal elements, for textual and tabular tags (resembling HTML), and for modular, generic elements, that allow easy extendibility to the DTD. Also the treatment of meta-information is examined in this paper.We produce a short account of several analogous experiences in Northern Europe, carried out by both public institutions and private legal publishers. Mention is also made of the European Union\u27s similar projects