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Looking Inside the Black Box: Core Semantics Towards Accountability of Artificial Intelligence

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From Software Engineering to Formal Methods and Tools, and Back

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11865))

Abstract

Recent advances in artificial intelligence raise a number of concerns. Among the challenges to be addressed by researchers, accountability of artificial intelligence solutions is one of the most critical. This paper focuses on artificial intelligence applications using natural language to investigate if the core semantics defined for a large-scale natural language processing system could assist in addressing accountability issues. Core semantics aims to obtain a full interpretation of the content of natural language texts, representing both implicit and explicit knowledge, using only ‘subj-action-(obj)’ structures and causal, temporal, spatial and personal-world links. The first part of the paper offers a summary of the difficulties to be addressed and of the reasons why representing the meaning of a natural language text is relevant for artificial intelligence accountability. In the second part, a-proof-of-concept for the application of such a knowledge representation to support accountability, and a detailed example of the analysis obtained with a prototype system named CoreSystem is illustrated. While only preliminary, these results give some new insights and indicate that the provided knowledge representation can be used to support accountability, looking inside the box.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The following brief description of the prototype system is provided in order to outline what has been used to produce the analysis below. The system is at present not available for external testing; furthermore, as it is under development, no claims are made here to its coverage or efficiency with respect to other NLP systems.

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Acknowledgments

As researchers in natural language processing and requirements engineering, authors shared a number of papers with Stefania Gnesi and her research group since the early 1990s. She is a passionate scientist, and these exchanges resulted in a fruitful and enriching relationship.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Founding Editor), Cambridge, UK

    Roberto Garigliano

  2. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Luisa Mich

Authors
  1. Roberto Garigliano
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  2. Luisa Mich
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luisa Mich .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy

    Maurice H. ter Beek

  2. Università degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy

    Alessandro Fantechi

  3. Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Laura Semini

Appendix A

Appendix A

Representation of the Meaning of the Sentence: “A 59-year-old man from York has been arrested on suspicion of murdering missing chef Claudia Lawrence”.

figure a
figure b
figure c

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Garigliano, R., Mich, L. (2019). Looking Inside the Black Box: Core Semantics Towards Accountability of Artificial Intelligence. In: ter Beek, M., Fantechi, A., Semini, L. (eds) From Software Engineering to Formal Methods and Tools, and Back. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11865. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30985-5_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30985-5_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30984-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30985-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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