An intelligent on-line help system: ASSIST

Abstract

This paper describes an intelligent on-line help system, ASSIST, which is designed to produce multi-sentential explanations in response to user's questions about computer terminology. One of the significant features of ASSIST is to take into account the user's knowledge when generating explanations. In order for ASSIST to have the ability to provide different explanations in accordance with the user's level of expertise, a user model is constructed throughout a session, and it is utilized to accomplish text planning to achieve the user's goal extracted from the question. In other words, during the course of text planning, ASSIST examines the user model, determines how much information is sufficient for the user, and cuts off unimportant and redundant concepts which the user already knows. Another feature of ASSIST is that focusing information is introduced to ensure that the generated explanation is coherent. Since the relationship between the resultant concepts cannot be specified by themselves, focusing information is utilized to decide on how to express them in the explanation (i.e. pronominalization and passive/active construction).