Psychology and philosophy have long studied the nature and role of explanation. More recently, artificial intelligence research has developed promising theories of how explanation facilitates learning and generalization. By using explanations to guide learning, explanation-based methods allow reliable learning of new concepts in complex situations, often from observing a single example.
The author of this volume, however, argues that explanation-based learning research has neglected key issues in explanation construction and evaluation. By examining the issues in the context of a story understanding system that explains novel events in news stories, the author shows that the standard assumptions do not apply to complex real-world domains. An alternative theory is presented, one that demonstrates that context -- involving both explainer beliefs and goals -- is crucial in deciding an explanation's goodness and that a theory of the possible contexts can be used to determine which explanations areappropriate. This important view is demonstrated with examples of the performance of ACCEPTER, a computer system for story understanding, anomaly detection, and explanation evaluation.

Psychology and philosophy have long studied the nature and role of explanation. More recently, artificial intelligence research has developed promising theories of how explanation facilitates learning and generalization. By using explanations to guide learning, explanation-based methods allow reliable learning of new concepts in complex situations, often from observing a single example. The author of this volume, however, argues that explanation-based learning research has neglected key issues in explanation construction and evaluation. By examining the issues in the context of a story understanding system that explains novel events in news stories, the author shows that the standard assumptions do not apply to complex real-world domains. An alternative theory is presented, one that demonstrates that context -- involving both explainer beliefs and goals -- is crucial in deciding an explanation's goodness and that a theory of the possible contexts can be used to determine which explanations are appropriate. This important view is demonstrated with examples of the performance of ACCEPTER, a computer system for story understanding, anomaly detection, and explanation evaluation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Modeling and Retrieval of Context, MRC Edinburgh 2005. The 9 revised full papers presented were carefully selected and include extended versions of some presented at the MRC 2005 workshop. A major goal of the workshop was to study, understand, and explore the handling of context in IT applications. The papers illustrate the state of the art of context modeling and elicitation as well as identification and application of context in different application scenarios.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ICCBR-97, held in Providence, RI, USA, in July 1997.
The volume presents 39 revised full scientific papers selected from a total of 102 submissions; also included are 20 revised application papers. Among the topics covered are representation and formalization, indexing and retrieval, adaptation, learning, integrated approaches, creative reasoning, CBR and uncertainty. This collection of papers is a comprehensive documentation of the state of the art in CBR research and development.