# From Black Boxes to Conversations: Incorporating XAI in a Conversational Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02552 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02552/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 29 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Sep 2022.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Model Cards for Model Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03993/) (2018)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [Explaining Machine Learning Classifiers through Diverse Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07697/) (2019)
- [Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00069/) (2018)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [From Anecdotal Evidence to Quantitative Evaluation Methods: A Systematic Review on Evaluating Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08164/) (2022)
- [Explanations based on the Missing: Towards Contrastive Explanations with Pertinent Negatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07623/) (2018)
- [Questioning the AI: Informing Design Practices for Explainable AI User Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02478/) (2020)
- [Interpretable Counterfactual Explanations Guided by Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02584/) (2019)
- [Neural Prototype Trees for Interpretable Fine-grained Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02046/) (2020)
- [Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09902/) (2017)
- [Neural Approaches to Conversational AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08267/) (2018)
- [Human-Centered Explainable AI (XAI): From Algorithms to User Experiences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10790/) (2021)
- [Multifaceted Feature Visualization: Uncovering the Different Types of Features Learned By Each Neuron in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03616/) (2016)
- [Boolean Decision Rules via Column Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09901/) (2018)
- [Interpretable Predictions of Tree-based Ensembles via Actionable Feature Tweaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06691/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Explainability as a Dialogue: A Practitioner's Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01875/) (2022)
- [Interpretable to Whom? A Role-based Model for Analyzing Interpretable Machine Learning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07552/) (2018)
- [Interpretability via Model Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09773/) (2017)
- [What Would You Ask the Machine Learning Model? Identification of User Needs for Model Explanations Based on Human-Model Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05674/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [LLMs for Explainable AI: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00125/) (2025)
- [LLMs for XAI: Future Directions for Explaining Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06064/) (2024)
- [CoXQL: A Dataset for Parsing Explanation Requests in Conversational XAI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08101/) (2024)
- [An Agentic Approach to Generating XAI-Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20003/) (2026)
- [Tell me more: Intent Fulfilment Framework for Enhancing User Experiences in Conversational XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10446/) (2024)
- [Through the Thicket: A Study of Number-Oriented LLMs derived from Random Forest Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04926/) (2024)
- [Show Me How: Benefits and Challenges of Agent-Augmented Counterfactual Explanations for Non-Expert Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13897/) (2025)
- [An AI Chatbot for Explaining Deep Reinforcement Learning Decisions of Service-oriented Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14391/) (2023)
- [Enhancing ML Model Interpretability: Leveraging Fine-Tuned Large Language Models for Better Understanding of AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02859/) (2025)
- [What Do People Want to Know About Artificial Intelligence (AI)? The Importance of Answering End-User Questions to Explain Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06428/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Datasets for Custom Input Extraction and Explanation Requests Parsing in Conversational XAI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14982/) (2025)
- [Designing Gaze Analytics for ELA Instruction: A User-Centered Dashboard with Conversational AI Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03741/) (2025)
- [MATCH: Engineering Transparent and Controllable Conversational XAI Systems through Composable Building Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22420/) (2025)
- [Exploring Plan Space through Conversation: An Agentic Framework for LLM-Mediated Explanations in Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02070/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of Explainable AI (XAI) is to design methods to provide insights into the reasoning process of black-box models, such as deep neural networks, in order to explain them to humans. Social science research states that such explanations should be conversational, similar to human-to-human explanations. In this work, we show how to incorporate XAI in a conversational agent, using a standard design for the agent comprising natural language understanding and generation components. We build upon an XAI question bank, which we extend by quality-controlled paraphrases, to understand the user's information needs. We further systematically survey the literature for suitable explanation methods that provide the information to answer those questions, and present a comprehensive list of suggestions. Our work is the first step towards truly natural conversations about machine learning models with an explanation agent. The comprehensive list of XAI questions and the corresponding explanation methods may support other researchers in providing the necessary information to address users' demands. To facilitate future work, we release our source code and data.