DAISY: An Implementation of Five Core Principles for Transparent and Accountable Conversational AI

Journal article, 2023

We present a detailed implementation of five core principles for transparent and acccountable conversational AI, namely interpretability, inherent capability to explain, independent data, interactive learning, and inquisitiveness. This implementation is a dialogue manager called DAISY that serves as the core part of a conversational agent. We show how DAISY-based agents are trained with human-machine interaction, a process that also involves suggestions for generalization from the agent itself. Moreover, these agents are capable to provide a concise and clear explanation of the actions required to reach a conclusion. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are currently the de facto standard in conversational AI. We therefore formulate a comparison between DAISY-based agents and two methods that use DNNs, on two popular data sets involving multi-domain task-oriented dialogue. Specifically, we provide quantitative results related to entity retrieval and qualitative results in terms of the type of errors that may occur. The results show that DAISY-based agents achieve superior precision at the price of lower recall, an outcome that might be preferable in task-oriented settings. Ultimately, and especially in view of their high degree of interpretability, DAISY-based agents are a fundamentally different alternative to the currently popular DNN-based methods.