PML 2: A Modular Explanation Interlingua

In the past five years, we have designed and evolved an interlingua for sharing explanations generated by various automated systems such as hybrid web-based question answering systems, text analytics, theorem proving, task processing, web services execution, rule engines, and machine learning components. In this paper, we present our recent major updates including: (i) splitting the interlingua into three modules (i.e. provenance, information manipulation or justifications, and trust) to reduce maintenance and reuse costs and to support various modularity requirements; (ii) providing representation primitives capable of representing four critical types of justifications identified in past work. We also discuss some examples of how this work can be and is being used in a variety of distributed application settings.