arXiv subjects

Eduard Barbu

Publications and source records attributed to Eduard Barbu.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ReX-GG: a LLM Ensemble Pipeline for Relation-extraction and Graph Generation

Current LLM ensemble frameworks focus on multi-step setups with additional modules for answer ranking, often opting for token and span analysis rather than structured outputs, leading to heavyweight architectures with potential fail states along the pipeline. Faster, lighter solutions are more vulnerable to hallucination propagation and can lack output control in more complex pipelines. This paper proposes a customisable, lightweight ensemble workflow of coordinated Large Language Models that leverages JSON-structured outputs and anonymous peer-review ranking to mitigate hallucinatory outputs and single-model failure points. The pipeline is demonstrated on a relation extraction task applied to popular science articles in English, targeting four ontologically-grounded relation types (strong causation, weak causation, contrastive, and compositional), with semantic node canonicalisation and interactive, colour-coded HTML causal graphs as the final output. Performance is evaluated through an anonymous user study, achieving an average perceived accuracy of 0.778 against a human-annotated gold standard. The modular architecture supports flexible deployment across both API-based and in-house LLM setups, and the full framework is released under an open license to foster reproducibility and collaborative research.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Evaluating Conversational Explainability in Healthcare: Comparing the Explainability Assistant and a Traditional XAI Dashboard

Conversational interfaces may make explainable AI (XAI) more accessible to users without machine learning expertise, but their benefits over dashboards remain insufficiently characterised in healthcare. Existing systems have typically been evaluated in isolation, leaving unclear whether conversational interaction improves interpretability beyond the underlying explanation methods. We report a within-subjects user study comparing the Explainability Assistant, an LLM function-calling conversational XAI system, with a traditional dashboard for explaining a heart disease classification model trained on the Cleveland Heart Disease dataset. Both interfaces expose the same Decision Tree classifier and post-hoc explanation methods: SHAP feature attribution, DiCE counterfactuals, and what-if analysis. This design supports comparison of interaction modalities while holding the model and explanation methods constant. Five participants with healthcare backgrounds, from medical students to practising clinicians and public health researchers, completed parallel task blocks on both interfaces; three participated in follow-up interviews. Task accuracy, Likert ratings, free-text questionnaire responses, and interviews revealed complementary strengths and weaknesses rather than a clear preference for either modality. The assistant offered easier entry and patient-specific explanations, while the dashboard supported simultaneous inspection of global and local information. All three interview participants recommended integrating conversational and dashboard elements within a single clinical workflow.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Document-Level Text Simplification in Estonian Using Large Language Models

Document-level text simplification involves transformations that go beyond sentence-internal edits, addressing discourse coherence, anaphora resolution, and cross-paragraph consistency. Despite advances in sentence-level simplification for high-resource languages, document-level simplification in morphologically rich, low-resource languages such as Estonian remains largely unexplored. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art multilingual large language models (LLMs) for document-level simplification in Estonian. Three prompting strategies are examined: single-pass generation, pipeline-based modular agents, and guideline-augmented pipelines. The evaluation framework integrates automatic metrics assessing readability, semantic preservation, and discourse coherence, alongside a structured manual annotation protocol. The findings indicate that Gemini-2.0 and LLaMA-3.3 produce outputs with near-native fluency and strong meaning preservation, whereas other models display notable grammatical and semantic limitations. This work contributes novel document-level coherence metrics, evidence-based prompting strategies, and publicly available resources for reproducibility.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Explainability Assistant: A Conversational XAI Interface for Interpreting Energy Consumption Models

Energy consumption forecasting relies on increasingly complex machine learning (ML) models, such as Genetic Programming-based symbolic regressors, whose predictions can be difficult for facility managers and building operators to interpret. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques address this opacity, but traditional XAI dashboards require substantial technical expertise and provide limited flexibility for dynamic, context-aware inquiry. Conversational XAI systems offer a promising alternative; however, previous approaches, such as TalkToModel, were constrained by rigid custom grammars and achieved only 76.8% intent-parsing accuracy. This paper introduces the Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI system that leverages the function-calling capabilities of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome these limitations. The system achieves 94% intent-parsing accuracy, supports flexible natural language interaction, and adapts to different ML problem types without task-specific fine-tuning. We present the system's architecture and report results from a comparative evaluation conducted with energy domain specialists, contrasting the Explainability Assistant with a traditional XAI dashboard. The evaluation suggests improved usability and consistent task accuracy, with all experts unanimously preferring the conversational interface for practical use.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Improving Estonian Text Simplification through Pretrained Language Models and Custom Datasets

This paper presents a method for text simplification based on two neural architectures: a neural machine translation (NMT) model and a fine-tuned large language model (LLaMA). Given the scarcity of existing resources for Estonian, a new dataset was created by combining manually translated corpora with GPT-4.0-generated simplifications. OpenNMT was selected as a representative NMT-based system, while LLaMA was fine-tuned on the constructed dataset. Evaluation shows LLaMA outperforms OpenNMT in grammaticality, readability, and meaning preservation. These results underscore the effectiveness of large language models for text simplification in low-resource language settings. The complete dataset, fine-tuning scripts, and evaluation pipeline are provided in a publicly accessible supplementary package to support reproducibility and adaptation to other languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Do LLMs Understand Romanian Driving Laws? A Study on Multimodal and Fine-Tuned Question Answering

Ensuring that both new and experienced drivers master current traffic rules is critical to road safety. This paper evaluates Large Language Models (LLMs) on Romanian driving-law QA with explanation generation. We release a 1{,}208-question dataset (387 multimodal) and compare text-only and multimodal SOTA systems, then measure the impact of domain-specific fine-tuning for Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct and RoLlama 3.1-8B-Instruct. SOTA models perform well, but fine-tuned 8B models are competitive. Textual descriptions of images outperform direct visual input. Finally, an LLM-as-a-Judge assesses explanation quality, revealing self-preference bias. The study informs explainable QA for less-resourced languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Emerging categories in scientific explanations

Clear and effective explanations are essential for human understanding and knowledge dissemination. The scope of scientific research aiming to understand the essence of explanations has recently expanded from the social sciences to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Explanations for machine learning decisions must be impactful and human-like, and there is a lack of large-scale datasets focusing on human-like and human-generated explanations. This work aims to provide such a dataset by: extracting sentences that indicate explanations from scientific literature among various sources in the biotechnology and biophysics topic domains (e.g. PubMed's PMC Open Access subset); providing a multi-class notation derived inductively from the data; evaluating annotator consensus on the emerging categories. The sentences are organized in an openly-available dataset, with two different classifications (6-class and 3-class category annotation), and the 3-class notation achieves a 0.667 Krippendorf Alpha value.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Towards Unifying Evaluation of Counterfactual Explanations: Leveraging Large Language Models for Human-Centric Assessments

As machine learning models evolve, maintaining transparency demands more human-centric explainable AI techniques. Counterfactual explanations, with roots in human reasoning, identify the minimal input changes needed to obtain a given output and, hence, are crucial for supporting decision-making. Despite their importance, the evaluation of these explanations often lacks grounding in user studies and remains fragmented, with existing metrics not fully capturing human perspectives. To address this challenge, we developed a diverse set of 30 counterfactual scenarios and collected ratings across 8 evaluation metrics from 206 respondents. Subsequently, we fine-tuned different Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict average or individual human judgment across these metrics. Our methodology allowed LLMs to achieve an accuracy of up to 63% in zero-shot evaluations and 85% (over a 3-classes prediction) with fine-tuning across all metrics. The fine-tuned models predicting human ratings offer better comparability and scalability in evaluating different counterfactual explanation frameworks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Exploring Commonalities in Explanation Frameworks: A Multi-Domain Survey Analysis

This study presents insights gathered from surveys and discussions with specialists in three domains, aiming to find essential elements for a universal explanation framework that could be applied to these and other similar use cases. The insights are incorporated into a software tool that utilizes GP algorithms, known for their interpretability. The applications analyzed include a medical scenario (involving predictive ML), a retail use case (involving prescriptive ML), and an energy use case (also involving predictive ML). We interviewed professionals from each sector, transcribing their conversations for further analysis. Additionally, experts and non-experts in these fields filled out questionnaires designed to probe various dimensions of explanatory methods. The findings indicate a universal preference for sacrificing a degree of accuracy in favor of greater explainability. Additionally, we highlight the significance of feature importance and counterfactual explanations as critical components of such a framework. Our questionnaires are publicly available to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge in the field of XAI.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Can summarization approximate simplification? A gold standard comparison

This study explores the overlap between text summarization and simplification outputs. While summarization evaluation methods are streamlined, simplification lacks cohesion, prompting the question: how closely can abstractive summarization resemble gold-standard simplification? We address this by applying two BART-based BRIO summarization methods to the Newsela corpus, comparing outputs with manually annotated simplifications and achieving a top ROUGE-L score of 0.654. This provides insight into where summarization and simplification outputs converge and differ.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

BibRank: Automatic Keyphrase Extraction Platform Using~Metadata

Automatic Keyphrase Extraction involves identifying essential phrases in a document. These keyphrases are crucial in various tasks such as document classification, clustering, recommendation, indexing, searching, summarization, and text simplification. This paper introduces a platform that integrates keyphrase datasets and facilitates the evaluation of keyphrase extraction algorithms. The platform includes BibRank, an automatic keyphrase extraction algorithm that leverages a rich dataset obtained by parsing bibliographic data in BibTeX format. BibRank combines innovative weighting techniques with positional, statistical, and word co-occurrence information to extract keyphrases from documents. The platform proves valuable for researchers and developers seeking to enhance their keyphrase extraction algorithms and advance the field of natural language processing.

cs.CL↗