Generating explanations in context

Abstract

If user interfaces are to reap the benefits of natural language interaction, they must be endowed with the properties that make human natural language interaction so effective. Human-human explanation is an inherently incremental and interactive process. New information must be highlighted and related to what has already been presented. In this paper, we describe the explanation component of a medical information-giving system. We describe the architectural features that enable this component to generate subsequent explanations that take into account the context created by its prior utterances.