The PhD defence will be partially digital, in Kristen Nygaards sal (5370), Ole Johan Dahls hus, and streamed directly using Zoom. The host of the session will moderate the technicalities while the chair of the defence will moderate the disputation.
Ex auditorio questions: the chair of the defence will invite the attending audience at Kristen Nygaards sal (5370), Ole Johan Dahls hus to ask ex auditorio questions.
Trial lecture
Time and place: June 19, 2026 11:15 AM. Kristen Nygaards sal (5370), Ole-Johan Dahls hus/ zoom.
Main research findings
The deployment of AI in high-stakes sectors requires trustworthiness and accountability. This thesis focuses on generating faithful, grounded and adaptable natural language explanations for question answering tasks using neuro-symbolic methods, enabling users to better understand, inspect, and validate the system’s decisions.
Neuro-symbolic methods are architectures that combine the flexibility and learning capacity of neural components with the transparency and reasoning precision of symbolic components. This thesis shows how these methods can improve the consistency between the explanations and the system's reasoning process. It also investigates how different forms of domain knowledge can be represented through neural or symbolic techniques, and how they can be effectively incorporated to enhance the quality and usefulness of explanations. Depending on domain constraints and requirements, different model adaptation methods are employed, and new evaluation frameworks focusing on user trust are proposed beyond existing automated metrics.
Adjudication committee
- Professor Anna Fensel, Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands
- Associate Professor Amir H. Payberah, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
- Associate Professor Yves Scherrer, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
Professor Ingrid Chieh Yu, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
Associate Professor Evgeny Kharlamov, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
Professor Özgü Mira Alay-Erduran, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo,
Contact information at Department: Mozhdeh Sheibani Harat