Operationalizing Social Interaction

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make the decisions and behavior of an AI understandable to the people interacting with it and to those affected by its outcomes. To make XAI social, real-world XAI systems need to simulate not only the ways in which human explainers behave within explanatory dialogs but also the ways in which such dialogs can successfully achieve the intended understanding on the explainee’s side. This, in turn, requires an operationalization of the three core aspects of social XAI: multimodality, incrementality, and patterns. This chapter lays the ground for this goal by defining a basic operational model of social interactions that can be refined and extended to account for the specificities of any explanatory real-world setting. This serves as a basis for summarizing and discussing existing ideas from explainability research and related areas in order to operationalize each core aspect. Selected examples and case studies illustrate how to concretely realize such an operationalization, thereby serving as a starting point for future research on social interaction with XAI.</jats:p>