Participating in explanatory dialogues

by Johanna D. Moore

While much has been written about text generation, text planning, discourse modeling, and user modeling, Johanna Moore's book is one of the first to tackle modeling the complex dynamics of explanatory dialogues. It describes an explanation-planning architecture that enables a computational system to participate in an interactive dialogue with its users, focusing on the knowledge structures that a system must build in order to elaborate or clarify prior utterances or to answer follow-up questions in the context of an ongoing dialogue. Moore develops a model of explanation generation and describes a fully implemented natural language system that is embedded in an existing expert system and includes a generation component. Her main thesis is that shallow approaches to explanation such as paraphrasing the expert system's line of reasoning or filling in an explanation "schema" - are not adequate for supporting dialogue, and thus a more flexible approach is needed, one that is adaptive to co