arXiv subjects

Trung Dong Huynh

Publications and source records attributed to Trung Dong Huynh.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

A taxonomy of explanations to support Explainability-by-Design

As automated decision-making solutions are increasingly applied to all aspects of everyday life, capabilities to generate meaningful explanations for a variety of stakeholders (i.e., decision-makers, recipients of decisions, auditors, regulators...) become crucial. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of explanations that was developed as part of a holistic 'Explainability-by-Design' approach for the purposes of the project PLEAD. The taxonomy was built with a view to produce explanations for a wide range of requirements stemming from a variety of regulatory frameworks or policies set at the organizational level either to translate high-level compliance requirements or to meet business needs. The taxonomy comprises nine dimensions. It is used as a stand-alone classifier of explanations conceived as detective controls, in order to aid supportive automated compliance strategies. A machinereadable format of the taxonomy is provided in the form of a light ontology and the benefits of starting the Explainability-by-Design journey with such a taxonomy are demonstrated through a series of examples.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Why Are Conversational Assistants Still Black Boxes? The Case For Transparency

Much has been written about privacy in the context of conversational and voice assistants. Yet, there have been remarkably few developments in terms of the actual privacy offered by these devices. But how much of this is due to the technical and design limitations of speech as an interaction modality? In this paper, we set out to reframe the discussion on why commercial conversational assistants do not offer meaningful privacy and transparency by demonstrating how they \emph{could}. By instrumenting the open-source voice assistant Mycroft to capture audit trails for data access, we demonstrate how such functionality could be integrated into big players in the sector like Alexa and Google Assistant. We show that this problem can be solved with existing technology and open standards and is thus fundamentally a business decision rather than a technical limitation.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

A Methodology and Software Architecture to Support Explainability-by-Design

Algorithms play a crucial role in many technological systems that control or affect various aspects of our lives. As a result, providing explanations for their decisions to address the needs of users and organisations is increasingly expected by laws, regulations, codes of conduct, and the public. However, as laws and regulations do not prescribe how to meet such expectations, organisations are often left to devise their own approaches to explainability, inevitably increasing the cost of compliance and good governance. Hence, we envision Explainability-by-Design, a holistic methodology characterised by proactive measures to include explanation capability in the design of decision-making systems. The methodology consists of three phases: (A) Explanation Requirement Analysis, (B) Explanation Technical Design, and (C) Explanation Validation. This paper describes phase (B), a technical workflow to implement explanation capability from requirements elicited by domain experts for a specific application context. Outputs of this phase are a set of configurations, allowing a reusable explanation service to exploit logs provided by the target application to create provenance traces of the application's decisions. The provenance then can be queried to extract relevant data points, which can be used in explanation plans to construct explanations personalised to their consumers. Following the workflow, organisations can design their decision-making systems to produce explanations that meet the specified requirements. To facilitate the process, we present a software architecture with reusable components to incorporate the resulting explanation capability into an application. Finally, we applied the workflow to two application scenarios and measured the associated development costs. It was shown that the approach is tractable in terms of development time, which can be as low as two hours per sentence.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Provenance Graph Kernel

Provenance is a record that describes how entities, activities, and agents have influenced a piece of data; it is commonly represented as graphs with relevant labels on both their nodes and edges. With the growing adoption of provenance in a wide range of application domains, users are increasingly confronted with an abundance of graph data, which may prove challenging to process. Graph kernels, on the other hand, have been successfully used to efficiently analyse graphs. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph kernel called provenance kernel, which is inspired by and tailored for provenance data. It decomposes a provenance graph into tree-patterns rooted at a given node and considers the labels of edges and nodes up to a certain distance from the root. We employ provenance kernels to classify provenance graphs from three application domains. Our evaluation shows that they perform well in terms of classification accuracy and yield competitive results when compared against existing graph kernel methods and the provenance network analytics method while more efficient in computing time. Moreover, the provenance types used by provenance kernels also help improve the explainability of predictive models built on them.

cs.LG↗