Christophe Guéret

Greta Warren, Mark T. Keane, Christophe Gueret et al.

Counterfactual explanations are an increasingly popular form of post hoc explanation due to their (i) applicability across problem domains, (ii) proposed legal compliance (e.g., with GDPR), and (iii) reliance on the contrastive nature of human explanation. Although counterfactual explanations are normally used to explain individual predictive-instances, we explore a novel use case in which groups of similar instances are explained in a collective fashion using ``group counterfactuals'' (e.g., to highlight a repeating pattern of illness in a group of patients). These group counterfactuals meet a human preference for coherent, broad explanations covering multiple events/instances. A novel, group-counterfactual algorithm is proposed to generate high-coverage explanations that are faithful to the to-be-explained model. This explanation strategy is also evaluated in a large, controlled user study (N=207), using objective (i.e., accuracy) and subjective (i.e., confidence, explanation satisfaction, and trust) psychological measures. The results show that group counterfactuals elicit modest but definite improvements in people's understanding of an AI system. The implications of these findings for counterfactual methods and for XAI are discussed.

Daniel Daza, Alberto Bernardi, Luca Costabello et al.

Methods for query answering over incomplete knowledge graphs retrieve entities that are likely to be answers, which is particularly useful when such answers cannot be reached by direct graph traversal due to missing edges. However, existing approaches have focused on queries formalized using first-order-logic. In practice, many real-world queries involve constraints that are inherently vague or context-dependent, such as preferences for attributes or related categories. Addressing this gap, we introduce the problem of query answering with soft constraints. We propose a Neural Query Reranker (NQR) designed to adjust query answer scores by incorporating soft constraints without disrupting the original answers to a query. NQR operates interactively, refining answers based on incremental examples of preferred and non-preferred entities. We extend existing QA benchmarks by generating datasets with soft constraints. Our experiments demonstrate that NQR can capture soft constraints while maintaining robust query answering performance.

Cathal Ryan, Christophe Guéret, Donagh Berry et al.

Mastitis is a billion dollar health problem for the modern dairy industry, with implications for antibiotic resistance. The use of AI techniques to identify the early onset of this disease, thus has significant implications for the sustainability of this agricultural sector. Current approaches to treating mastitis involve antibiotics and this practice is coming under ever increasing scrutiny. Using machine learning models to identify cows at risk of developing mastitis and applying targeted treatment regimes to only those animals promotes a more sustainable approach. Incorrect predictions from such models, however, can lead to monetary losses, unnecessary use of antibiotics, and even the premature death of animals, so it is important to generate compelling explanations for predictions to build trust with users and to better support their decision making. In this paper we demonstrate a system developed to predict mastitis infections in cows and provide explanations of these predictions using counterfactuals. We demonstrate the system and describe the engagement with farmers undertaken to build it.

Cathal Ryan, Christophe Guéret, Donagh Berry et al.

The aim of this study was to build a modelling framework that would allow us to be able to detect mastitis infections before they would normally be found by farmers through the introduction of machine learning techniques. In the making of this we created two different modelling framework's, one that works on the premise of detecting Sub Clinical mastitis infections at one Somatic Cell Count recording in advance called SMA and the other tries to detect both Sub Clinical mastitis infections aswell as Clinical mastitis infections at any time the cow is milked called AMA. We also introduce the idea of two different feature sets for our study, these represent different characteristics that should be taken into account when detecting infections, these were the idea of a cow differing to a farm mean and also trends in the lactation. We reported that the results for SMA are better than those created by AMA for Sub Clinical infections yet it has the significant disadvantage of only being able to classify Sub Clinical infections due to how we recorded Sub Clinical infections as being any time a Somatic Cell Count measurement went above a certain threshold where as CM could appear at any stage of lactation. Thus in some cases the lower accuracy values for AMA might in fact be more beneficial to farmers.

Severin Gsponer, Luca Costabello, Chan Le Van et al.

Sequence classification is the supervised learning task of building models that predict class labels of unseen sequences of symbols. Although accuracy is paramount, in certain scenarios interpretability is a must. Unfortunately, such trade-off is often hard to achieve since we lack human-independent interpretability metrics. We introduce a novel sequence learning algorithm, that combines (i) linear classifiers - which are known to strike a good balance between predictive power and interpretability, and (ii) background knowledge embeddings. We extend the classic subsequence feature space with groups of symbols which are generated by background knowledge injected via word or graph embeddings, and use this new feature space to learn a linear classifier. We also present a new measure to evaluate the interpretability of a set of symbolic features based on the symbol embeddings. Experiments on human activity recognition from wearables and amino acid sequence classification show that our classification approach preserves predictive power, while delivering more interpretable models.

Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Christophe Guéret, Stefan Schlobach

The Semantic Web is built on top of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) (vocabularies, ontologies, concept schemes) that provide a structured, interoperable and distributed access to Linked Data on the Web. The maintenance of these KOS over time has produced a number of KOS version chains: subsequent unique version identifiers to unique states of a KOS. However, the release of new KOS versions pose challenges to both KOS publishers and users. For publishers, updating a KOS is a knowledge intensive task that requires a lot of manual effort, often implying deep deliberation on the set of changes to introduce. For users that link their datasets to these KOS, a new version compromises the validity of their links, often creating ramifications. In this paper we describe a method to automatically detect which parts of a Web KOS are likely to change in a next version, using supervised learning on past versions in the KOS version chain. We use a set of ontology change features to model and predict change in arbitrary Web KOS. We apply our method on 139 varied datasets systematically retrieved from the Semantic Web, obtaining robust results at correctly predicting change. To illustrate the accuracy, genericity and domain independence of the method, we study the relationship between its effectiveness and several characterizations of the evaluated datasets, finding that predictors like the number of versions in a chain and their release frequency have a fundamental impact in predictability of change in Web KOS. Consequently, we argue for adopting a release early, release often philosophy in Web KOS development cycles.

Peter Mutschke, Andrea Scharnhorst, Christophe Guéret et al.

Information systems usually show as a particular point of failure the vagueness between user search terms and the knowledge orders of the information space in question. Some kind of guided searching therefore becomes more and more important in order to precisely discover information without knowing the right search terms. Knowledge maps of digital library collections are promising navigation tools through knowledge spaces but still far away from being applicable for searching digital libraries. However, there is no continuous knowledge exchange between the "map makers" on the one hand and the Information Retrieval (IR) specialists on the other hand. Thus, there is also a lack of models that properly combine insights of the two strands. The proposed workshop aims at bringing together these two communities: experts in IR reflecting on visual enhanced search interfaces and experts in knowledge mapping reflecting on visualizations of the content of a collection that might also present a context for a search term in a visual manner. The intention of the workshop is to raise awareness of the potential of interactive knowledge maps for information seeking purposes and to create a common ground for experiments aiming at the incorporation of knowledge maps into IR models at the level of the user interface.