A Reactive Approach to Explanation

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.