Explanation and dialogue

Abstract

Recent approaches to providing advisory knowledge-based systems with explanation capabilities are reviewed. The importance of explaining a system's behaviour and conclusions was recognized early in the development of expert systems. Initial approaches were based on the presentation of an edited proof trace to the user, but while helpful for debugging knowledge bases, these explanations are of limited value to most users. Current work aims to expand the kinds of explanation which can be offered and to embed explanations into a dialogue so that the topic of the explanation can be negotiated between the user and the system. This raises issues of mutual knowledge and dialogue control which are discussed in the review.