Timezone: »

 
TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations
Dylan Slack · Satyapriya Krishna · Himabindu Lakkaraju · Sameer Singh

@
in Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning »
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=cSiFMffu3yw »

Machine Learning (ML) models are increasingly used to make critical decisions in real-world applications, yet they have become more complex, making them harder to understand. To this end, researchers have proposed several techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use these explainability techniques because they often do not know which one to choose and how to interpret the results of the explanations. In this work, we address these challenges by introducing TalkToModel: an interactive dialogue system for explaining machine learning models through conversations. TalkToModel comprises 1) a dialogue engine that adapts to any tabular model and dataset, understands language, and generates responses, and 2) an execution component that constructs the explanations. In real-world evaluations with humans, 73% of healthcare workers (e.g., doctors and nurses) agreed they would use TalkToModel over baseline point-and-click systems for explainability in a disease prediction task, and 85% of ML professionals agreed TalkToModel was easier to use for computing explanations. Our findings demonstrate that TalkToModel is more effective for model explainability than existing systems, introducing a new category of explainability tools for practitioners. We release code a demo for the \sys system at: \texttt{anonymized}.

[ Poster]  [ OpenReview]  [ Topia] 

Author Information

Dylan Slack (UC Irvine)
Satyapriya Krishna (Harvard University)
Himabindu Lakkaraju (Harvard)
Sameer Singh (University of California, Irvine)

Sameer Singh is an Assistant Professor at UC Irvine working on robustness and interpretability of machine learning. Sameer has presented tutorials and invited workshop talks at EMNLP, Neurips, NAACL, WSDM, ICLR, ACL, and AAAI, and received paper awards at KDD 2016, ACL 2018, EMNLP 2019, AKBC 2020, and ACL 2020. Website: http://sameersingh.org/

More from the Same Authors