Automated Generation of Ethical Profile-Building Questionnaires

In the realm of user-centric AI, designing systems that can adapt to the needs and preferences of users is essential. An emerging approach to accomplish this involves developing ethical profiles of users and incorporating them into the system, as the ethical profile provides a comprehensive overview of users' moral perspectives. One of the possible ways to collect user preferences and build profiles is through questionnaires. However, significant effort is required from designers to draft questions that are both relevant and engaging for respondents. To this end, we propose an approach that helps designers generate customized ethical profile-building questionnaires while ensuring that the questions are relevant and effective, and that can be further used to build user ethical profiles. Our approach follows a trait-question pair strategy, where trait represents virtues and vices of human character, while question represents queries about daily-life situations for the trait under consideration. This will help designers evaluate how a user responds to a particular question for a certain trait and build a detailed ethical profile. Designers can choose the traits to be evaluated through the questionnaire and modify existing questions to best fit their needs. In this preliminary work, we present our approach and its initial implementation. To demonstrate its applicability, we applied our approach to the ETHICS dataset, which provides daily-life scenarios about various normative aspects, from which we extracted 311 traits and generated 150 questions for 15 selected traits. Future work involves developing the tool for designers to interact with and customize questionnaires, generating source code for tailored questionnaires for multiple target platforms, and validating the accuracy of the overall approach.