Importance and implementation of explanation in expert systems

Explanation is crucial in persuading others of the correctness of our beliefs to gain acceptance of our conclusion. Early research into expert systems focused on methods for reasoning. However it became apparent that the ultimate success lay in the ability to gain user acceptance by explaining the reasoning behind the conclusion. This study examines explanation from a social and an implementation standpoint. The social aspects of explanation provide insight into the role of naturally occurring explanations and listener expectations. Examination of research expert systems with explanation facilities and modifications of a simple Prolog expert system shell demonstrate the techniques required to simulate naturally occurring text. The modified shell produces improved explanations over the original shell, clearly indicating the desirability of natural appearance for gaining user acceptance

Highlighting User Related Advice

Research on explanation techniques for expert systems has demonstrated that (1) explanations are most effective when they address the user's needs and (2) it is necessary to augment explanations with information that is missing from the expert system‘s reasoning. It is our thesis that explanation content can also be improved by removing extraneous information from the system's reasoning and recognizing the remainder to emphasize user concerns. To test our ideas, we have developed an interactive natural language problem-solving system called ADVISOR which advises students on course selection. Previously, we have reported on our methodology for deriving user goals from the discourse, representing different points of view in the knowledge base and inferring user-oriented advice with a rule-based system that employs information from the appropriate perspective to address user goals. In this paper, we describe a model for pruning an explanation to highlight the role of the user's goal. The model is part of ADVISOR's natural language generation component. We demonstrate its efficacy with examples of different advice that ADVISOR provides for the same query in the context of different goals

Perspective Reasoning and the Solution to the Sleeping Beauty Problem

This paper proposes a new explanation for the paradoxes related to anthropic reasoning. Solutions to the Sleeping Beauty Problem and the Doomsday argument are discussed in detail. The main argument can be summarized as follows: Our thoughts, reasonings and narratives inherently comes from a certain perspective. With each perspective there is a center, or using the term broadly, a self. The natural first-person perspective is most primitive. However we can also think and express from others’ perspectives with a theory of mind. A perspective’s center could be unrelated to the topic of discussion so its de se thoughts need not to be considered, e.g. the perspective of an outside observer. Let’s call these the third-person perspective. First-person reasoning allows primitive self identification as I am inherently unique as the center of the perspective. Whereas from third-person perspective I am not fundamentally special comparing to others so a reference class of observers including me can be defined. It is my contention that reasonings from different perspectives should not mix. Otherwise it could lead to paradoxes even independent of anthropic reasoning. The paradoxes surrounding anthropic reasoning are caused by the aforementioned perspective mix. Regarding the sleeping beauty problem the correct answer should be double halving. Lewisian halving and thirding uses unique reasonings from both first and third-person perspectives. Indexical probabilities such as “the probability that this is the first awakening” or “the probability of me being one of the first 100 billion human beings” also mixes first- and third-person reasonings. Therefore invalid. Readers against perspectivism may disagree with point 1 and suggest we could reason in objective terms without the limit of perspectives. My argument is compatible with this belief. Objective reasoning would be analytically identical to the third-person perspective. My argument would become that objective reasoning and perspective reasonings should not mix. In the following I would continue to use “third-person perspective” but readers can switch that to “objective reasoning” if they wish so