Predictive models make mistakes and have biases. To combat both, we need to understand their predictions.Explainable AI (XAI) provides insights into models for vision, language, and tabular data. However, only a few approaches exist for speech classification models. Previous works focus on a selection of spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks, and most users find their explanations challenging to interpret.We propose a novel approach to explain speech classification models. It provides two types of insights. (i) Word-level. We measure the impact of each audio segment aligned with a word on the outcome. (ii) Paralinguistic. We evaluate how non-linguistic features (e.g., prosody and background noise) affect the outcome if perturbed.We validate our approach by explaining two state-of-the-art SLU models on two tasks in English and Italian. We test their plausibility with human subject ratings. Our results show that the explanations correctly represent the model’s inner workings and are plausible to humans.

The use of Natural Language Processing techniques in the legal domain has become established for supporting attorneys and domain experts in content retrieval and decision-making. However, understanding the legal text poses relevant challenges in the recognition of domain-specific entities and the adaptation and explanation of predictive models. This paper addresses the Legal Entity Name Recognition (L-NER) and Court judgment Prediction (CPJ) and Explanation (CJPE) tasks. The L-NER solution explores the use of various transformer-based models, including an entity-aware method attending domain-specific entities. The CJPE proposed method relies on hierarchical BERT-based classifiers combined with local input attribution explainers. We propose a broad comparison of eXplainable AI methodologies along with a novel approach based on NER. For the L-NER task, the experimental results remark on the importance of domain-specific pre-training. For CJP our lightweight solution shows performance in line with existing approaches, and our NER-boosted explanations show promising CJPE results in terms of the conciseness of the prediction explanations.