Explainability and interpretability are two critical aspects of decision support systems. Despite their importance, it is only recently that researchers are starting to explore these aspects. This paper provides an introduction to explainability and interpretability in the context of apparent personality recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in this direction. We describe a challenge we organized on explainability in first impressions analysis from video. We analyze in detail the newly introduced data set, evaluation protocol, proposed solutions and summarize the results of the challenge. We investigate the issue of bias in detail. Finally, derived from our study, we outline research opportunities that we foresee will be relevant in this area in the near future.

Video blogs (vlogs) are a popular media form for people to present themselves. In case a vlogger would be a job candidate, vlog content can be useful for automatically assessing the candidates traits, as well as potential interviewability. Using a dataset from the CVPR ChaLearn competition, we build a model predicting Big Five personality trait scores and interviewability of vloggers, explicitly targeting explainability of the system output to humans without technical background. We use human-explainable features as input, and a linear model for the systems building blocks. Four multimodal feature representations are constructed to capture facial expression, movement, and linguistic usage. For each, PCA is used for dimensionality reduction and simple linear regression for the predictive model. Our system's accuracy lies in the middle of the quantitative competition chart, while we can trace back the reasoning behind each score and generate a qualitative analysis report per video.