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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Appelt, Douglas E. 1985. Planning English Sentences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
Buchanan and Shortliffe, 1984) Buchanan, Bruce G. and Shortliffe, Edward H. 1984. Rule-Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of Me Stanford Heuristic Programming Project. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Carberry, Sandra 1983. Tracking user goals in an information-seeking environment. In Proceedings of the Third National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Washington, D.C. 59–63.
Clancey, William J. and Letsinger, Reed 1981. NEOMYCIN: Reconfiguring a rule-based expert system for application to teaching. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vancouver, B. C., Canada. 829–836.
Clancey, 1983) Clancey, William J. 1983. The epistemology of a rule-based expert system: a framework for explanation. Artificial Intelligence 20(3):215251.
Cohen, Philip R. and Perrault, C. Raymond 1979. Elements of a plan-based theory of speech acts. Cognitive Science 3: 177–212.
Davis, Randall 1976. Applications of Meta-level Knowledge to the Construction, Maintenance, and Use of Large Knowledge Bases. Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University.
De Smedt and Kempen, 1987) De Smedt, Koenraad and Kempen, Gerard 1987. Incremental sentence production, self-correction and coordination. In Natural Language Generation: New Results in Artificial Intelligence. Marti-nus Nijhoff Publishers.
De Smedt and Kempen, 1990) De Smedt, Koenraad and Kempen, Gerard 1987. Segment Grammar: a Formalism for Incremental Sentence Generation In Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics,(this volume). Paris, Swartout, Mann (Eds). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA.
Grosz, Barbara J. and Sidner, Candace L. 1986. Attention, intention, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12 (3): 175–204.
Hovy, 1988a) Hovy, Eduard H. 1988a. Planning coherent multisentential text. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics State University of New York, Buffalo, New York.
Hovy, 1988b) Hovy, Eduard H. 1988b. Two types of planning in language generation. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics State University of New York, Buffalo, New York.
Hovy, Eduard H. 1990. Approaches to the planning of coherent text. In Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, (this volume). Paris, Swartout, Mann (Eds). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA.
Kasper, Robert 1989. SPL: A sentence plan language for text generation. Technical Report forthcoming, USC/Information Sciences Institute.
Kass, Robert and Finin, Tim 1988. Modeling the user in natural language systems. Computational Linguistics 14 (3): 5–22.
Kendon, Adam 1967. Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica 26: 22–63.
Litman, Diane 1985. Plan Recognition and Discourse Analysis: An Integrated Approach for Understanding Dialogues. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester. Published by University of Rochester as Technical Report TR 170.
Mann, William C. and Matthiessen, Christian 1983. Nigel: A systemic grammar for text generation. Technical Report RR-83–105, USC/Information Sciences Institute.
Mann and Thompson, 1987) Mann, William C. and Thompson, Sandra A. 1987. Rhetorical Structure Theory: A theory of text organization. In Polanyi, Livia, editor 1987, The Structure of Discourse. Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, N.J. Also available as USC/Information Sciences Institute Technical Report Number RS-87–190.
Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M. 1984. Systemic grammar in computation: the Nigel case. Technical Report RR-83–121, USC/Information Sciences Institute.
McCoy, 1989) McCoy, Kathleen F. 1989. Generating context sensitive responses to object-related misconceptions. Artificial Intelligence 41(2):157195.
McKeown, Kathleen R.; Wish, Myron; and Matthews, Kevin 1985. Tailoring explanations for the user. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Los Angeles, CA. 794–798.
McKeown, Kathleen R. 1985. Text Generation: Using Discourse Strategies and Focus Constraints to Generate Natural Language Text. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
Moore and Paris, 1988) Moore, Johanna D. and Paris, Cécile L. 1988. Constructing coherent text using rhetorical relations. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society,Montreal, Quebec.
Moore and Paris, 1989) Moore, Johanna D. and Paris, Cécile L. 1989. Planning text for advisory dialogues. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Moore and Swartout, 1990) Moore, Johanna D. and Swartout, William R. 1990. Pointing: A way toward explanation dialogue. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence Boston, MA.
Moore, Johanna D. 1989. A Reactive Approach to Explanation in Expert and Advice-Giving Systems. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
Neches, Robert, Swartout, William R. and Moore, Johanna D. 1985. Enhanced maintenance and explanation of expert systems through explicit models of their development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-11(11).
Paris, Cécile L. 1988. Tailoring object descriptions to the user’s level of expertise. Computational Linguistics 14 (3): 64–78.
Paris, Cécile L. 1990. Generation and explanation: Building an explanation facility for the explainable expert systems framework. In Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, (this volume). Paris, Swartout, Mann (Eds). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA.
Pollack, 1982) Pollack, Martha E., Hirschberg, Julia and Webber, Bonnie Lynn 1982. User participation in the reasoning processes of expert systems. Technical Report CIS-82–10, University of Pennsylvania. A short version of this report appears in the Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1982.
Ringle, Martin H. and Bruce, Bertram C. 1981. Conversation failure. In Lehnert, Wendy G. and Ringle, Martin H., editors 1981, Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey. 203–221.
Sacerdoti, Earl D. 1975. A structure for plans and behavior. Technical Report TN-109, SRI.
Sidner, Candace L. 1979. Toward a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse. Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Sparck Jones, Karen 1984. User models and expert systems. Technical Report No. 61, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
Swartout, William R. and Smoliar, Stephen W. 1987. On making expert systems more like experts. Expert Systems 4 (3).
Swartout, William R. 1981. Explaining and justifying expert consulting programs. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vancouver, B. C., Canada. 815–823.
Swartout, 1983) Swartout, William R. 1983. XPLAIN: A system for creating and explaining expert consulting systems. Artificial Intelligence 21(3):285325. Also available as ISI/RS-83–4.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5945-7_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-5125-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-5945-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive