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.