The 1988 AAAI Workshop on Explanation

This article is a summary of the Workshop on Explanation held during the 1988 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in St. Paul, Minnesota. The purpose of the workshop was to identify key research issues in the rapidly emerging area of expert system explanation. Expert system explanation is the study of how to give an expert system the ability to provide an explanation of its actions and conclusions to a variety of users (including the domain expert, knowledge engineer, and end user). The 1988 AAAI Workshop on Explanation brought together many of the world's experts on expert system explanation in an attempt to highlight key research areas and questions that should be the focus of subsequent work. The one-day workshop was organized into five sessions of short presentations, each followed by panelled open discussion among the 35 workshop participants.