Combining Cognitive and Affective Measures with Epistemic Planning for Explanation Generation

This paper presents an overview of the EPSRC-funded project Start Making Sense, which is investigating explainability and trust maintenance in interactive and autonomous systems. This project brings together experimental research in cognitive science involving cooperative joint action with the practical construction of automated planning tools to apply to the task of explanation generation. The project’s challenges are addressed through three concrete objectives: (i) to study cooperative joint action in humans to identify the emotional, affective, or cognitive factors that are essential for successful human communication, (ii) to enhance epistemic planning techniques with measures derived from the studies for improved human-like explanation generation, and (iii) to deploy and evaluate the resulting system with human participants. We also describe initial work from the cognitive side of the project aimed at exploring how ambiguity, uncertainty, and certain types of biometric measurements impact instruction giving and explanation actions in scenarios with humans. The insights from this work will be combined with epistemic planning techniques to generate appropriate explanatory actions in similar instruction giving scenarios.