User-Adapted Hypertext Explanations

Explanations should be adapted to the user's need. Therefore, a good explanation facility should offer an alternative if a given explanation is not clear or complete. This paper describes how this purpose can be achieved through a combination of user modeling, adaptive explanation generation, and hypertext techniques. First, we describe how to generate menus of questions which are adapted to the working context and the explanation situation, so that selections can be made. The user-tailored question-answering facility described next produces a first, short answer to the question asked according to what the user probably needs. However, assumptions about the user's need are open to various sources of uncertainty, and therefore may be incorrect. Therefore, our system offer the user the option of accessing other, possibly important, pieces of information through a hypertext facility. Thus, the advantage of this approach is that it reduces difficulties in user modeling and in interpreting requests for further information