[ont.events] Correcting the User When the Perspective Counts.

ylfink@water.waterloo.edu (ylfink) (01/29/88)

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR

                    - Friday, February 5, 1988

Professor  Kathleen  F.  McCoy,  from the University of
Delaware,  will speak on ``Correcting the User When the
Perspective Counts''.

TIME:                1:30 PM

ROOM:              MC 6091A

ABSTRACT

Analysis  of a corpus of naturally occurring data shows
that  users conversing with a database or expert system
are  likely  to reveal misconceptions about the objects
modelled  by  the system. Further analysis reveals that
the  sort  of  responses given when such misconceptions
are   encountered  depends  greatly  on  the  discourse
context.  This work develops a context-sensitive method
for   automatically  generating  responses  to  object-
related misconceptions with the goal of incorporating a
correction  module  in  the  front-end of a database or
expert  system.  The method is demonstrated through the
ROMPER    system     (Responding    to   Object-related
Misconceptions  using  PERspective)  which  is  able to
generate  responses  to  two  classes of object-related
misconceptions: misclassifications and misattributions.

The  transcript  analysis  reveals a number of specific
strategies   used   by   human   experts   to   correct
misconceptions, where each different strategy refutes a
different  kind  of  support  for the misconception. In
this  work  each  strategy  is paired with a structural
specification of the kind of support it refutes. ROMPER
uses  this  specification,  and a model of the user, to
determine  which  kind  of support is most likely.  The
corresponding response strategy is then instantiated.

The  above  process  is  made  context  sensitive  by a
proposed  addition to standard knowledge-representation
systems  termed object perspective.  Object perspective
is  introduced  as  a  method for augmenting a standard
knowledge-representation    system   to   reflect   the
highlighting affects of previous discourse. It is shown
how  this resulting highlighting can be used to account
for   the   context-sensitive   requirements   of   the
correction process.