Generating Interactive Explanations

Abstract

Existing approaches to text generation fail to consider how interactions with the user may be managed within a coherent explanation or description. This paper presents an approach to generating such interactive explanations based on two levels of discourse planning -- content planning and dialogue planning. The system developed allows aspects of the changing context to be monitored with an explanation, and the developing explanation to depend on this changing context. Interruptions from the user are allowed and dealt with (and resumed from) within the context of that explanation. Introduction Complex explanations and descriptions are required in many existing computer applications. Tutorial, advisory and help systems may all sometimes need to present some complex piece of information, which cannot be reasonably be presented in one `chunk'. In human discourse this may result in complex `explanatory dialogues', where an expert attempts to explain something, checking the novice's unders...