Chen Qian
Other people with similar names: Chen Qian, Chen Qian
Unverified author pages with similar names: Chen Qian
2026
From “Thinking” to “Justifying”: Aligning High-Stakes Explainability with Professional Communication Standards
Chen Qian | Yimeng Wang | Yu Chen | Lingfei Wu | Andreas Stathopoulos
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Chen Qian | Yimeng Wang | Yu Chen | Lingfei Wu | Andreas Stathopoulos
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Explainable AI (XAI) in high-stakes domains should help stakeholders trust and verify system outputs. Yet Chain-of-Thought methods reason before concluding, and logical gaps or hallucinations can yield conclusions that do not reliably align with their rationale. Thus, we propose “Result → Justify”, which constrains the output communication to present a conclusion before its structured justification. We introduce SEF (Structured Explainability Framework), operationalizing professional conventions (e.g., CREAC, BLUF) via six metrics for structure and grounding. Experiments across four tasks in three domains validate this approach: all six metrics correlate with correctness (r=0.20–0.42; p<0.001), and SEF achieves 83.9% accuracy (+5.3 over CoT). These results suggest structured justification can improve verifiability and may also improve reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/cqian03/SEF.