With a kick-off event on March 3 in the CITEC building at Bielefeld University, the Collaborative Research Center/Transregio TRR 318 “Constructing Explainability” officially began its second funding phase. The next phase of joint research was heralded with lectures and various exchange formats for members and associates.
In the first funding phase, the researchers demonstrated that explanations are only effective if they take into account the perspective of those receiving them. Building on these findings, the second funding phase will focus in particular on the context of explanations – for example, different situations, settings, individuals, and the shared knowledge that emerges in dialogue.
The aim of the upcoming research phase is to investigate how explanations need to be adapted to these contextual conditions and how AI systems can respond to them. In the future, AI systems should be able to design explanations flexibly and continue the dialogue with users in a manner appropriate to the situation.
With the start of the second funding phase, two new subprojects are also being launched in TRR 318:
In project B07, researchers are investigating how users use interactive prompts to request information and explanations from AI systems based on large language models, such as ChatGPT. Conversation analysis is used to investigate how understanding develops gradually in exchanges with AI and how users learn to better classify the systems' responses. The goal is to develop a context-sensitive framework for human-machine interaction.
Project C07 addresses the question of how large language models can be adapted to work with users to develop explanations. The aim is for AI systems to recognize in dialogue what has already been understood, where uncertainties still exist, and how explanations can be built up step by step by specifically taking relevant knowledge and contextual information into account.
More than 60 researchers from seven disciplines are involved in a total of 20 subprojects at TRR 318.
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