Building English Explanations from Function Descriptions

Unknown author (1979-04)

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Office of Naval Research under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-75-C-0389.

Working Paper

An explanatory component is an important ingredient in any complex AI system. A simple generative scheme to build descriptive phrases from Lisp function calls can produce respectable explanations if explanation generators capitalize on the function decomposition reflected in Lisp programs.