GUPEA

Gothenburg University Publications Electronic Archive

GUPEA is a platform for e-publishing of theses, student essays and other research publications.

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  • What do you base that conclusion on? Grounding explainable AI in human dialogue strategies
    (2026-05-11) Berman, Alexander
    When human decisions are assisted by predictions from artificial intelligence (AI) models, users' ability to understand the basis of AI outputs can be important for various reasons, such as assessing the reliability of specific predictions. One way to achieve such understanding is by letting AI systems explain their predictions. This thesis explores how AI systems can be designed to emulate how humans manage explanations in dialogue. The first part of the thesis studies expert explanations for medical judgements in clinical settings without AI assistance as well as lay explanations in an experimental setting with AI assistance. By applying a dialogue distillation methodology, collected human–human interactions are rewritten into analogous human–AI dialogues, thereby revealing capabilities that a conversationally explainable AI system would need to possess to emulate human explanatory behaviours. Based on the finding that human interlocutors often explain judgements argumentatively (as claims supported by premises) and enthymematically (by omitting one or more premises), the thesis proposes a method for extracting arguments from generalised linear models, a popular type of predictive model, and demonstrates that the method can be used to generate enthymematic explanations that invite inferences that correctly reflect the actual reasoning of the model. A design workshop with orthopaedic surgeons is also performed, indicating that users find the generated explanations informative and that they can correctly interpret generated explanations. In the final part of the thesis, observed human dialogue strategies are formally modelled in a novel framework for explanatory dialogue management based on information-state updates conceived as linear implications. The proposed framework accounts for many of the observed phenomena and strategies, including complex explanantia, chained inferences, forward expansions and signalling of presupposition violations and answer unavailability. Future research challenges associated with emulating observed human explanation strategies are also identified and discussed.
  • Energi /
    (1910) Ostwald, Wilhelm,
  • Adjektivkongruens i estlandssvenska. En studie i förändring och variation
    (2026-05-11) Västerdal, Ida
    This aim of this dissertation is to provide a systematic description of adjective inflection in the Estonia-Swedish dialects on the basis of new and more comprehensive empirical data. Departing from Old Swedish, the study examines the diachronic development of adjective inflection in these dialects. The study also discusses the Estonia-Swedish adjective inflection in relation to previous accounts of gender agreement and noun phrase structure in closely related varieties. The study examines adjective inflection in texts written in nine different Estonia-Swedish dialects. In addition, interviews with the last dialect speakers are conducted. The results reveal several types of variation. The geographical variation is prominent: only two of the nine dialects investigated exhibit identical inflectional paradigms. However, the syntactic variation is of particular interest. All but two dialects wholly or partially display distinct adjectival forms depending on whether the adjective occurs in attributive or predicative position. The agreement patterns identified in the survey indicate that the Estonia-Swedish dialects are typologically distinctive among the Germanic languages. First, several dialects exhibit overt inflection in predicative position but not in attributive position. Second, two dialects employ different inflectional suffixes in attributive and predicative positions. The underlying structure of the noun phrase in Estonia-Swedish appears not to align with that of Standard Swedish. Adopting a Minimalist framework, the dissertation discusses what the adjective inflectional system reveals about the internal structure of the noun phrase in one of the Estonia-Swedish dialects. A central question is whether attributive and predicative adjectives can be analyzed within a unified structural representation. The inflectional suffixes of adjectives in Estonia Swedish bear formal similarities to the Old Swedish adjectival endings for nominative and accusative case. The crucial difference, however, is that these suffixes do not encode case in Estonia-Swedish, but rather grammatical gender. In some of the dialects, a pattern emerges whereby the Old Swedish nominative endings correspond to gender endings in predicative position, while the Old Swedish accusative endings correspond to the gender endings in attributive position. A possible explanation for this development is discussed in terms of exaptation, i.e. the process whereby functionally redundant linguistic material is reassigned a new linguistic function.