1984 Reports

Determining the Level of Expertise of a User of a Question Answering System

Paris, Cecile L.

An intelligent question answering program should be able to tailor its answer to the user. Some factors entering this tailoring process include the level of expertise of the user, his goals for using the system, the discourse structure, and the user type. The decision on how sophisticated and detailed an answer should be is based, in part, on how much the user knows about the domain in question. In this paper, we are mainly concerned with determining the level of expertise of the user. We will show how a generalization based memory can be used in this process.