COOPERATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING AND EXPLANATION

Recent studies have pointed out several limitations of expert systems regarding user needs, and have introduced the concepts of cooperation and joint cognitive systems. While research on explanation generation by expert systems has been widely developed, there has been little consideration of explanation in relation to cooperative systems. Our aim is to elaborate a conceptual framework for studying explanation in cooperation. This work relies heavily on the study of human-human cooperative dialogues. We present our results according to Two dimensions; namely, the relation between explanation and problem solving, and the explanation process itself Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the design of cooperative systems.