Argument Schemes and a Dialogue System for Explainable Planning

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being increasingly deployed in practical applications. However, there is a major concern whether AI systems will be trusted by humans. To establish trust in AI systems, there is a need for users to understand the reasoning behind their solutions. Therefore, systems should be able to explain and justify their output. Explainable AI Planning is a field that involves explaining the outputs, i.e., solution plans produced by AI planning systems to a user. The main goal of a plan explanation is to help humans understand reasoning behind the plans that are produced by the planners. In this article, we propose an argument scheme-based approach to provide explanations in the domain of AI planning. We present novel argument schemes to create arguments that explain a plan and its key elements and a set of critical questions that allow interaction between the arguments and enable the user to obtain further information regarding the key elements of the plan. Furthermore, we present a novel dialogue system using the argument schemes and critical questions for providing interactive dialectical explanations.