BLAH, A System Which Explains its Reasoning

In this paper we describe the design of BLAH, ta system which combines a reasoning capability with an explanation capability. The primary focus of this work is on structuring explanations so that they do not appear complex, and thus are easy to understand. The features of explanation structure that are identified as important include constraints of syntactic form, ways of managing the embedding of explanations, and how the focus of attention is located and shifted. The reasoning component has been designed to take account of certain features needed in generating an acceptable explanation, such as the user's expectations.