A model for generating better explanations

Abstract

Previous work in generating explanations from advice-giving systems has demonstrated that a cooperative system can and should infer the immediate goals and plans of an utterance (or discourse segment) and formulate a response in light of these goals and plans. The claim of this paper is that a cooperative response may also have to address a user's overall goals, plans, and preferences among those goals and plans. An algorithm is introduced that generates user-specific responses by reasoning about the goals, plans and preferences hypothesized about a user.