Visualizing inference

Abstract

Common Sense Inference is an increasingly attractive technique to make computer interfaces more in touch with how human users think. However, the results of the inference process are often hard to interpret and evaluate. Visualization has been successful in many other fields of science, but to date it has not been used much for visualizing the results of inference. This thesis presents Alar, an interface which allows dynamic exploration of the results of the inference process. It enables users to detect errors in the input data and fine tune how liberal or conservative the inference should be. It accomplishes this through novel extensions to the AnalogySpace framework for inference and visualizing concepts and even assertions as nodes in a graph, clustered by their semantic relatedness. A usability study was performed and the results show users were able to successfully use Alar to determine the cause of an incorrect inference.