A Human-Grounded Evaluation Benchmark for Local Explanations of Machine Learning

In order for people to be able to trust and take advantage of the results of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions for real decision making, people need to be able to understand the machine rationale for given output. Research in explain artificial intelligence (XAI) addresses the aim, but there is a need for evaluation of human relevance and understandability of explanations. Our work contributes a novel methodology for evaluating the quality or human interpretability of explanations for machine learning models. We present an evaluation benchmark for instance explanations from text and image classifiers. The explanation meta-data in this benchmark is generated from user annotations of image and text samples. We describe the benchmark and demonstrate its utility by a quantitative evaluation on explanations generated from a recent machine learning algorithm. This research demonstrates how human-grounded evaluation could be used as a measure to qualify local machine-learning explanations.