English

Towards evaluating and eliciting high-quality documentation for intelligent systems

Software Engineering 2020-11-18 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

A vital component of trust and transparency in intelligent systems built on machine learning and artificial intelligence is the development of clear, understandable documentation. However, such systems are notorious for their complexity and opaqueness making quality documentation a non-trivial task. Furthermore, little is known about what makes such documentation "good." In this paper, we propose and evaluate a set of quality dimensions to identify in what ways this type of documentation falls short. Then, using those dimensions, we evaluate three different approaches for eliciting intelligent system documentation. We show how the dimensions identify shortcomings in such documentation and posit how such dimensions can be use to further enable users to provide documentation that is suitable to a given persona or use case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.08774,
  title  = {Towards evaluating and eliciting high-quality documentation for intelligent systems},
  author = {David Piorkowski and Daniel González and John Richards and Stephanie Houde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.08774},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

15 pages, 1 figure, 8 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:19:19.124Z