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A historical perspective of explainable Artificial Intelligence
Author(s) -
Confalonieri Roberto,
Coba Ludovik,
Wagner Benedikt,
Besold Tarek R.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
wiley interdisciplinary reviews: data mining and knowledge discovery
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.506
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1942-4795
pISSN - 1942-4787
DOI - 10.1002/widm.1391
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , computer science , artificial intelligence , expert system , applications of artificial intelligence , cognitive science , data science , knowledge management , psychology
Explainability in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been revived as a topic of active research by the need of conveying safety and trust to users in the “how” and “why” of automated decision‐making in different applications such as autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, or banking and finance. While explainability in AI has recently received significant attention, the origins of this line of work go back several decades to when AI systems were mainly developed as (knowledge‐based) expert systems. Since then, the definition, understanding, and implementation of explainability have been picked up in several lines of research work, namely, expert systems, machine learning, recommender systems, and in approaches to neural‐symbolic learning and reasoning, mostly happening during different periods of AI history. In this article, we present a historical perspective of Explainable Artificial Intelligence. We discuss how explainability was mainly conceived in the past, how it is understood in the present and, how it might be understood in the future. We conclude the article by proposing criteria for explanations that we believe will play a crucial role in the development of human‐understandable explainable systems. This article is categorized under: Fundamental Concepts of Data and Knowledge > Explainable AI Technologies > Artificial Intelligence