Metrics for Explainable AI: Challenges and Prospects
This addresses the challenge of measuring the effectiveness of XAI for users, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing concepts without introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating explainable AI systems by proposing metrics to assess explanation quality, user understanding, and system performance, based on a review of research literature and psychometric evaluations.
The question addressed in this paper is: If we present to a user an AI system that explains how it works, how do we know whether the explanation works and the user has achieved a pragmatic understanding of the AI? In other words, how do we know that an explanainable AI system (XAI) is any good? Our focus is on the key concepts of measurement. We discuss specific methods for evaluating: (1) the goodness of explanations, (2) whether users are satisfied by explanations, (3) how well users understand the AI systems, (4) how curiosity motivates the search for explanations, (5) whether the user's trust and reliance on the AI are appropriate, and finally, (6) how the human-XAI work system performs. The recommendations we present derive from our integration of extensive research literatures and our own psychometric evaluations.