A Systematic Approach for Tracking the Evolution of XAI as a Field of Research

The increasing use of AI methods in various applications has raised concerns about their explainability and transparency. Many solutions have been developed within the last few years to either explain the model itself or the decisions provided by the model. However, the number of contributions in the field of eXplainable AI (XAI) is increasing at such a high pace that it is almost impossible for a newcomer to identify key ideas, track the field's evolution, or find promising new research directions. Typically, survey papers serve as a starting point, providing a feasible entry point into a research area. However, this is not trivial for some fields with exponential growth in the literature, such as XAI. For instance, we analyzed 23 surveys in the XAI domain published within the last three years and surprisingly found no common conceptualization among them. This makes XAI one of the most challenging research areas to enter. To address this problem, we propose a systematic approach that enables newcomers to identify the principal ideas and track their evolution. The proposed method includes automating the retrieval of relevant papers, extracting their semantic relationship, and creating a temporal graph of ideas by post-analysis of citation graphs. The main outcome of our method is Field's Evolution Graph (FEG), which can be used to find the core idea of each approach in this field, see how a given concept has developed and evolved over time, observe how different notions interact with each other, and perceive how a new paradigm emerges through combining multiple ideas. As for demonstration, we show that FEG successfully identifies the field's key articles, such as LIME or Grad-CAM, and maps out their evolution and relationships.