Helpful, Misleading or Confusing: How Humans Perceive Fundamental Building Blocks of Artificial Intelligence Explanations

Abstract: Explainable artificial intelligence techniques are developed at breakneck speed, but suitable evaluation approaches lag behind. With explainers becoming increasingly complex and a lack of consensus on how to assess their utility, it is challenging to judge the benefit and effectiveness of different explanations. To address this gap, we take a step back from sophisticated predictive algorithms and instead look into explainability of simple decision-making models. In this setting, we aim to assess how people perceive comprehensibility of their different representations such as mathematical formulation, graphical representation and textual summarisation (of varying complexity and scope). This allows us to capture how diverse stakeholders -- engineers, researchers, consumers, regulators and the like -- judge intelligibility of fundamental concepts that more elaborate artificial intelligence explanations are built from. This position paper charts our approach to establishing appropriate evaluation methodology as well as a conceptual and practical framework to facilitate setting up and executing relevant user studies.