Explainable AI to support Veterans Transition Assistance Programs (XAI-VTAP)

A challenge for Artificial Intelligence recommenders is explaining their reasoning to users. Humans tend to explain concepts with symbolic narratives, which contrasts the way non-symbolic machine learning represents concepts. This research addresses this challenge by grounding the research in the problem of helping transitioning veterans find relevant careers. The developed prototype will provide job recommendations emerging from a Long Short-Term Memory trained on word embeddings derived from 1.73 million job descriptions and 70,000 resumes. Explanations of matches are grounded in selected text segments, or StoryGraph elements, from an individual’s resume with a skill decomposition graph providing additional clarification. By grounding the explanation, veterans will be able to understand causal relationships between resumes and job descriptions. The proposed second phase will investigate conceptual explanation through hierarchical learning and the potential for attention-based neural networks to improve the matching and semantic explanations. We will also extend the StoryGraph to provide insights into career path trajectories and create an interactive interface for veterans to gain deeper insights and explore hypotheticals. We propose an option task to explore generalizability by extending it to the medical domain to help match doctors and patients.