Dynamic Generation of Follow up Question Menus: Facilitating Interactive Natural Language Dialogues

Abstract

Most complex systems provide some form of help facilities. However, typically, such help facilities do not allow users to ask follow up questions or request further elaborations when they are not satisfied with the systems' initial offering. One approach to alleviating this problem is to present the user with a menu of possible follow up questions at every point. Limiting follow up information requests to choices in a menu has many advantages, but there are also a number of issues that must be dealt with in designing such a system. To dynamically generate useful embedded menus, the system must be able to, among other things, determine the context of the request, represent and reason about the explanations presented to the user, and limit the number of choices presented in the menu. This paper discusses such issues in the context of a patient education system that generates a natural language description in which the text is directly manipulable - clicking on portions of the text causes the system to generate menus that can be used to request elaborations and further information.