WebXAII: an open-source web framework to study human-XAI interaction

Abstract: This article introduces WebXAII, an open-source web framework designed to facilitate research on human interaction with eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems. The field of XAI is rapidly expanding, driven by the growing societal implications of the widespread adoption of AI (and in particular machine learning) across diverse applications. Researchers who study the interaction between humans and XAI techniques typically develop ad hoc interfaces in order to conduct their studies. These interfaces are usually not shared alongside the results of the studies, which limits their reusability and the reproducibility of experiments. In response, we design and implement WebXAII, a web-based platform that can embody full experimental protocols, meaning that it can present all aspects of the experiment to human participants and record their responses. The experimental protocols are translated into a composite architecture of generic views and modules, which offers a lot of flexibility. The architecture is defined in a structured configuration file, so that protocols can be implemented with minimal programming skills. We demonstrate that WebXAII can effectively embody relevant protocols, by reproducing the protocol of a state-of-the-art study of the literature.