Abstract
Explanation is an interactive process, requiring a dialogue between advice-giver and advice-seeker. Yet current expert systems cannot participate in a dialogue with users. In particular these systems cannot clarify misunderstood explanations, elaborate on previous explanations, or respond to follow-up questions in the context of the on-going dialogue. In this paper, we describe a reactive approach to explanation — one that can participate in an on-going dialogue and employs feedback from the user to guide subsequent explanations. Our system plans explanations from a rich set of explanation strategies, recording the system’s discourse goals, the plans used to achieve them, and any assumptions made while planning a response. This record provides the dialogue context the system needs to respond appropriately to the user’s feedback. We illustrate our approach with examples of disambiguating a follow-up question and producing a clarifying elaboration in response to a misunderstood explanation.
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Moore, J.D., Swartout, W.R. (1991). A Reactive Approach to Explanation: Taking the User’s Feedback into Account. In: Paris, C.L., Swartout, W.R., Mann, W.C. (eds) Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 119. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5945-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5945-7_1
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