Contextualized explanations

Abstract

The aim is to fill the gap between theory and practice in the production of explanations by a system. One reason of this gap arises from the fact that a problem is often solved thanks to a cooperation between the user and the system, and both participants in the cooperation need explanations. Explanations essentially depend on the context in which the user and the system interact. Such contextualized explanations are the result of a process and constitute a medium of communication between the user and the system during the problem solving. We focus on the need to make the context notion explicit in the explanation process. We analyze explanation and context in terms of chunks of knowledge. Then we point out the contribution of context to explanation. An example, drawn from a real application, introduces the problem.< >