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Description strategies for naive and expert users

Paris, Cecile L.

It is widely recognized that a question-answering system should be able to tailor its answers to the user. One of the dimensions along which this tailoring can occur is with respect to the level of knowledge of a user about a domain. In particular, responses should be different depending on whether they are addressed to naive or expert users. To understand what those differences should be, we analyzed texts from adult and junior encyclopedias. We found that two different strategies were used in describing complex physical objects to juniors and adults. We show how these strategies have been implemented on a test database.

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Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-167-85
Published Here
November 1, 2011