AI for human assessment: What do professional assessors need?
This work addresses the problem of maintaining stable and non-subjective observations for professional assessors in sensitive domains, representing an incremental improvement in human-AI collaboration for decision support.
The study tackled the challenge of using AI to support professional assessors in human resource evaluations by developing an unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm that extracts interpretable nonverbal cues from interview videos, which assessors found useful for enhancing confidence and objectivity in their assessments.
Recent organizations have started to adopt AI-based decision support tools to optimize human resource development practices, while facing various challenges of using AIs in highly contextual and sensitive domains. We present our case study that aims to help professional assessors make decisions in human assessment, in which they conduct interviews with assessees and evaluate their suitability for certain job roles. Our workshop with two industrial assessors elucidated troubles they face (i.e., maintaining stable and non-subjective observation of assessees' behaviors) and derived requirements of AI systems (i.e., extracting their nonverbal cues from interview videos in an interpretable manner). In response, we employed an unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm using multimodal behavioral features such as facial keypoints, body and head pose, and gaze. The algorithm extracts outlier scenes from the video based on behavioral features as well as informing which feature contributes to the outlierness. We first evaluated how the assessors would perceive the extracted cues and discovered that the algorithm is useful in suggesting scenes to which assessors would pay attention, thanks to its interpretability. Then, we developed an interface prototype incorporating the algorithm and had six assessors use it for their actual assessment. Their comments revealed the effectiveness of introducing unsupervised anomaly detection to enhance their feeling of confidence and objectivity of the assessment along with potential use scenarios of such AI-based systems in human assessment. Our approach, which builds on top of the idea of separating observation and interpretation in human-AI collaboration, will facilitate human decision making in highly contextual domains, such as human assessment, while keeping their trust in the system.