We define an inference system to capture explanations based on causal statements, using an ontology in the form of an IS-A hierarchy. We first introduce a simple logical language which makes it possible to express that a fact causes another fact and that a fact explains another fact. We present a set of formal inference patterns from causal statements to explanation statements. We introduce an elementary ontology which gives greater expressiveness to the system while staying close to propositional reasoning. We provide an inference system that captures the patterns discussed, firstly in a purely propositional framework, then in a datalog (limited predicate) framework.
Explainability has been a goal for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems since their conception, with the need for explainability growing as more complex AI models are increasingly used in critical, high-stakes settings such as healthcare. Explanations have often added to an AI system in a non-principled, post-hoc manner. With greater adoption of these systems and emphasis on user-centric explainability, there is a need for a structured representation that treats explainability as a primary consideration, mapping end user needs to specific explanation types and the system's AI capabilities. We …
We addressed the problem of a lack of semantic representation for user-centric explanations and different explanation types in our Explanation Ontology (https://purl.org/heals/eo). Such a representation is increasingly necessary as explainability has become an important problem in Artificial Intelligence with the emergence of complex methods and an uptake in high-precision and user-facing settings. In this submission, we provide step-by-step guidance for system designers to utilize our ontology, introduced in our resource track paper, to plan and model for explanations during the design of the…
New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；Wells Fargo Bank（富国银行）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）
In this paper, we introduce a novel interpreting framework that learns an interpretable model based on an ontology-based sampling technique to explain agnostic prediction models. Different from existing approaches, our algorithm considers contextual correlation among words, described in domain knowledge ontologies, to generate semantic explanations. To narrow down the search space for explanations, which is a major problem of long and complicated text data, we design a learnable anchor algorithm, to better extract explanations locally. A set of regulations is further introduced, regarding comb…
Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学法学院）
Ontology is a popular method for knowledge representation in different domains, including the legal domain, and description logics (DL) is commonly used as its description language. To handle reasoning based on inconsistent DL-based legal ontologies, the current paper presents a structured argumentation framework particularly for reasoning in legal contexts on the basis of ASPIC+, and translates the legal ontology into formulas and rules of an argumentation theory. With a particular focus on the design of autonomous vehicles from the perspective of legal AI, we show that using this combined th…
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia（拉脱维亚大学数学与计算机科学研究所）
Ontologies are one of the core foundations of the Semantic Web. To participate in Semantic Web projects, domain experts need to be able to understand the ontologies involved. Visual notations can provide an overview of the ontology and help users to understand the connections among entities. However, the users first need to learn the visual notation before they can interpret it correctly. Controlled natural language representation would be readable right away and might be preferred in case of complex axioms, however, the structure of the ontology would remain less apparent. We propose to combi…
We examine the practicality for a user of using Answer Set Programming (ASP) for representing logical formalisms. Our example is a formalism aiming at capturing causal explanations from causal information. We show the naturalness and relative efficiency of this translation job. We are interested in the ease for writing an ASP program. Limitations of the earlier systems made that in practice, the ``declarative aspect'' was more theoretical than practical. We show how recent improvements in working ASP systems facilitate the translation.
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Università degli Studi di Brescia（布雷西亚大学）
Causal models are playing an increasingly important role in machine learning, particularly in the realm of explainable AI. We introduce a conceptualisation for generating argumentation frameworks (AFs) from causal models for the purpose of forging explanations for the models' outputs. The conceptualisation is based on reinterpreting desirable properties of semantics of AFs as explanation moulds, which are means for characterising the relations in the causal model argumentatively. We demonstrate our methodology by reinterpreting the property of bi-variate reinforcement as an explanation mould t…
Jožef Stefan Institute（约瑟夫·斯特凡研究所）；Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School（约瑟夫·斯特凡国际研究生院）
Ontologies are increasingly used for machine reasoning over the last few years. They can provide explanations of concepts or be used for concept classification if there exists a mapping from the desired labels to the relevant ontology. Another advantage of using ontologies is that they do not need a learning process, meaning that we do not need the train data or time before using them. This paper presents a practical use of an ontology for a classification problem from the financial domain. It first transforms a given ontology to a graph and proceeds with generalization with the aim to find co…
We examine the practicality for a user of using Answer Set Programming (ASP) for representing logical formalisms. We choose as an example a formalism aiming at capturing causal explanations from causal information. We provide an implementation, showing the naturalness and relative efficiency of this translation job. We are interested in the ease for writing an ASP program, in accordance with the claimed ``declarative'' aspect of ASP. Limitations of the earlier systems (poor data structure and difficulty in reusing pieces of programs) made that in practice, the ``declarative aspect'' was more t…
In this paper an ontological representation and reasoning paradigm has been proposed for interpretation of time-series signals. The signals come from sensors observing a smart environment. The signal chosen for the annotation process is a set of unintuitive and complex gas sensor data. The ontology of this paradigm is inspired form the SSN ontology (Semantic Sensor Network) and used for representation of both the sensor data and the contextual information. The interpretation process is mainly done by an incremental ASP solver which as input receives a logic program that is generated from the c…
Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU（弗劳恩霍夫机床与成形技术研究所）；Technische Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）
This paper describes a novel Python package, named causalgraph, for modeling and saving causal graphs embedded in knowledge graphs. The package has been designed to provide an interface between causal disciplines such as causal discovery and causal inference. With this package, users can create and save causal graphs and export the generated graphs for use in other graph-based packages. The main advantage of the proposed package is its ability to facilitate the linking of additional information and metadata to causal structures. In addition, the package offers a variety of functions for graph …
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense knowledge, should itself be used as a guide to discovering the structure of commonsense knowledge. In addition to suggesting a systematic method to the discovery of the structure of commonsense knowledge, the method we propose seems to also provide an explanation for a number of phenomena in natural language, such as metaphor, intensionality, and the semantics …
We introduce novel mathematical models and algorithms to generate (shortest or k different) explanations for biomedical queries, using answer set programming. We implement these algorithms and integrate them in BIOQUERY-ASP. We illustrate the usefulness of these methods with some complex biomedical queries related to drug discovery, over the biomedical knowledge resources PHARMGKB, DRUGBANK, BIOGRID, CTD, SIDER, DISEASE ONTOLOGY and ORPHADATA. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).
Institute of Mathematics, Novosibirsk State University（新西伯利亚国立大学数学研究所）；Institute of Informatics Systems, Novosibirsk State University（新西伯利亚国立大学信息系统研究所）
We introduce an extension to the Protege ontology editor, which allows for discovering concept definitions, which are not explicitly present in axioms, but are logically implied by an ontology. The plugin supports ontologies formulated in the Description Logic EL, which underpins the OWL 2 EL profile of the Web Ontology Language and despite its limited expressiveness captures most of the biomedical ontologies published on the Web. The developed tool allows to verify whether a concept can be defined using a vocabulary of interest specified by a user. In particular, it allows to decide whether s…
Jožef Stefan Institute（约瑟夫·斯特凡研究所）；Qlector d.o.o.（Qlector 有限公司）；Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School（约瑟夫·斯特凡国际研究生院）
The paper proposes a novel architecture for explainable AI based on semantic technologies and AI. We tailor the architecture for the domain of demand forecasting and validate it on a real-world case study. The provided explanations combine concepts describing features relevant to a particular forecast, related media events, and metadata regarding external datasets of interest. The knowledge graph provides concepts that convey feature information at a higher abstraction level. By using them, explanations do not expose sensitive details regarding the demand forecasting models. The explanations a…
German Aerospace Center (DLR) e.V.（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Technical University of Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）
The verification and validation of automated driving systems at SAE levels 4 and 5 is a multi-faceted challenge for which classical statistical considerations become infeasible. For this, contemporary approaches suggest a decomposition into scenario classes combined with statistical analysis thereof regarding the emergence of criticality. Unfortunately, these associational approaches may yield spurious inferences, or worse, fail to recognize the causalities leading to critical scenarios, which are, in turn, prerequisite for the development and safeguarding of automated driving systems. As to i…
This paper presents correct algorithms for answering the following two questions; (i) Does there exist a causal explanation consistent with a set of background knowledge which explains all of the observed independence facts in a sample? (ii) Given that there is such a causal explanation what are the causal relationships common to every such causal explanation?
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Prompt-based methods have become increasingly popular among information extraction tasks, especially in low-data scenarios. By formatting a finetune task into a pre-training objective, prompt-based methods resolve the data scarce problem effectively. However, seldom do previous research investigate the discrepancy among different prompt formulating strategies. In this work, we compare two kinds of prompts, name-based prompt and ontology-base prompt, and reveal how ontology-base prompt methods exceed its counterpart in zero-shot event argument extraction (EAE) . Furthermore, we analyse the pote…
IBM Research GmbH（IBM研究院）；Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Bayesian networks can be used to extract explanations about the observed state of a subset of variables. In this paper, we explicate the desiderata of an explanation and confront them with the concept of explanation proposed by existing methods. The necessity of taking into account causal approaches when a causal graph is available is discussed. We then introduce causal explanation trees, based on the construction of explanation trees using the measure of causal information ow (Ay and Polani, 2006). This approach is compared to several other methods on known networks.
Although standard Machine Learning models are optimized for making predictions about observations, more and more they are used for making predictions about the results of actions. An important goal of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is to compensate for this mismatch by offering explanations about the predictions of an ML-model which ensure that they are reliably action-guiding. As action-guiding explanations are causal explanations, the literature on this topic is starting to embrace insights from the literature on causal models. Here I take a step further down this path by formally…
Counterfactual (CF) explanations have been employed as one of the modes of explainability in explainable AI-both to increase the transparency of AI systems and to provide recourse. Cognitive science and psychology, however, have pointed out that people regularly use CFs to express causal relationships. Most AI systems are only able to capture associations or correlations in data so interpreting them as casual would not be justified. In this paper, we present two experiment (total N = 364) exploring the effects of CF explanations of AI system's predictions on lay people's causal beliefs about t…
Causal Explanations Over Time: Articulated Reasoning for Interactive Environments
Technical University of Darmstadt（德累斯顿技术大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence（黑森人工智能中心）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）
This paper examines two related problems that are central to developing an autonomous decision-making agent, such as a robot. Both problems require generating structured representafions from a database of unstructured declarative knowledge that includes many facts and rules that are irrelevant in the problem context. The first problem is how to generate a well structured decision problem from such a database. The second problem is how to generate, from the same database, a well-structured explanation of why some possible world occurred. In this paper it is shown that the problem of generating …
A Computationally Feasible Framework for Causal Probabilistic Explanation
Basis Research Institute（贝西斯研究所）；Sorbus AI（索巴斯人工智能公司）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；HouseIQ（豪斯IQ公司）
Northrop Corporation（诺斯洛普公司）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）
In a previous paper [Pearl and Verma, 1991] we presented an algorithm for extracting causal influences from independence information, where a causal influence was defined as the existence of a directed arc in all minimal causal models consistent with the data. In this paper we address the question of deciding whether there exists a causal model that explains ALL the observed dependencies and independencies. Formally, given a list M of conditional independence statements, it is required to decide whether there exists a directed acyclic graph (dag) D that is perfectly consistent with M, namely, …
King's College London（伦敦国王学院）；Amazon.com, Inc.（亚马逊公司）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
We evaluate four computational models of explanation in Bayesian networks by comparing model predictions to human judgments. In two experiments, we present human participants with causal structures for which the models make divergent predictions and either solicit the best explanation for an observed event (Experiment 1) or have participants rate provided explanations for an observed event (Experiment 2). Across two versions of two causal structures and across both experiments, we find that the Causal Explanation Tree and Most Relevant Explanation models provide better fits to human data than …
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universita di Roma "La Sapienza"（罗马大学信息与系统系）
This paper is directed towards combining Pearl's structural-model approach to causal reasoning with high-level formalisms for reasoning about actions. More precisely, we present a combination of Pearl's structural-model approach with Poole's independent choice logic. We show how probabilistic theories in the independent choice logic can be mapped to probabilistic causal models. This mapping provides the independent choice logic with appealing concepts of causality and explanation from the structural-model approach. We illustrate this along Halpern and Pearl's sophisticated notions of actual ca…
Understanding causality has vital importance for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Beyond the labeled instances, conceptual explanations of the causality can provide deep understanding of the causal facts to facilitate the causal reasoning process. However, such explanation information still remains absent in existing causal reasoning resources. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting a human-annotated explainable CAusal REasoning dataset (e-CARE), which contains over 21K causal reasoning questions, together with natural language formed explanations of the causal qu…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；General Motors Research（通用汽车研究院）
We introduce a novel framework for causal explanations of stochastic, sequential decision-making systems built on the well-studied structural causal model paradigm for causal reasoning. This single framework can identify multiple, semantically distinct explanations for agent actions -- something not previously possible. In this paper, we establish exact methods and several approximation techniques for causal inference on Markov decision processes using this framework, followed by results on the applicability of the exact methods and some run time bounds. We discuss several scenarios that illus…
Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT)（图卢兹信息研究所（IRIT））；Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition (CerCo)（脑与认知研究中心（CerCo））；CNRS（国家科学研究中心）
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；IRIT（图卢兹信息学研究所）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；Université de Rennes I（雷恩第一大学）；INRIA Bretagne Atlantique（法国国家数字科学与技术研究院布列塔尼-大西洋中心）；IRISA（信息与随机系统研究所）
We investigate an approach to reasoning about causes through argumentation. We consider a causal model for a physical system, and look for arguments about facts. Some arguments are meant to provide explanations of facts whereas some challenge these explanations and so on. At the root of argumentation here, are causal links ({A_1, ... ,A_n} causes B) and ontological links (o_1 is_a o_2). We present a system that provides a candidate explanation ({A_1, ... ,A_n} explains {B_1, ... ,B_m}) by resorting to an underlying causal link substantiated with appropriate ontological links. Argumentation is …
University of South Australia（南澳大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
This paper studies the problem of estimating the contributions of features to the prediction of a specific instance by a machine learning model and the overall contribution of a feature to the model. The causal effect of a feature (variable) on the predicted outcome reflects the contribution of the feature to a prediction very well. A challenge is that most existing causal effects cannot be estimated from data without a known causal graph. In this paper, we define an explanatory causal effect based on a hypothetical ideal experiment. The definition brings several benefits to model agnostic exp…
Features of Explainability: How users understand counterfactual and causal explanations for categorical and continuous features in XAI
Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院计算机科学学院Insight SFI数据分析中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院计算机科学学院VistaMilk SFI研究中心）；School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin（都柏林圣三一学院心理学院和神经科学研究所）
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森州人工智能中心（hessian.AI））
