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Highlighting a User Model to Respond to Misconceptions

  • Conference paper
Book cover User Models in Dialog Systems

Part of the book series: Symbolic Computation ((1064))

Abstract

Responses to misconceptions given by human conversational partners often contain information refuting the possible reasoning which may have led to the misconceptions. This work describes generating such responses by reasoning on a highlighted model of the user to identify possible sources of the error. Domain-independent structural characterizations of a highlighted user model which suggest the source of several types of misconceptions are identified. Each is associated with a response strategy. The system can respond to a particular misconception by consulting the highlighted user model for one of the identified structural configurations and responding with the associated strategy. Transcripts of misconceptions corrected by human conversational partners show, however, that misconception responses must reflect the user's perspective on the objects involved. This context-dependent aspect of correcting misconceptions is captured by a new notion of object perspective which serves to highlight certain aspects of the user model due to the preceding discourse.

This paper is a revised and extended version of [MCCO88]

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Authors
  1. Kathleen F. McCoy
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Saarbrücken, D-6600, Saarbrücken 11, Fed. Rep. of Germany

    Alfred Kobsa  & Wolfgang Wahlster  & 

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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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McCoy, K.F. (1989). Highlighting a User Model to Respond to Misconceptions. In: Kobsa, A., Wahlster, W. (eds) User Models in Dialog Systems. Symbolic Computation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83230-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83230-7_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-83232-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-83230-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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