ML Anthology

A Reactive Approach to Explanation

Johanna D. Moore, William R. Swartout
IJCAI 1989 pp. 1504-1510
/ijcai/1989/moore1989ijcai-reactive/

Abstract

Explanation is an interactive process, requiring a dialogue between advice-giver and adviceseeker. 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. 1

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Text

Moore and Swartout. "A Reactive Approach to Explanation." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1989.

Markdown

[Moore and Swartout. "A Reactive Approach to Explanation." International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1989.](https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/1989/moore1989ijcai-reactive/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{moore1989ijcai-reactive,
  title     = {{A Reactive Approach to Explanation}},
  author    = {Moore, Johanna D. and Swartout, William R.},
  booktitle = {International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {1989},
  pages     = {1504-1510},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/ijcai/1989/moore1989ijcai-reactive/}
}