Simple explanations

Explaining Legislative Leadership Delegation : Simple Collective Action or Conditional Explanations ?

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In research areas such as decision support systems, one of the crucial features is the ability to automatically explain decisions. However, this ability does not typically play a large role in computer games. Here, I suggest that this situation will change: research on the automatic generation of explanations will have real import for many types of computer games. I discuss four possible ways t...

Great Explanations: Opinionated Explanations for Recommendation

Explaining recommendations helps users to make better, more satisfying decisions. We describe a novel approach to explanation for recommender systems, one that drives the recommendation process, while at the same time providing the user with useful insights into the reason why items have been chosen and the trade-offs they may need to consider when making their choice. We describe this approach...

The temperature-size rule in ectotherms: simple evolutionary explanations may not be general.

In many organisms, individuals in colder environments grow more slowly but are larger as adults. This widespread pattern is embodied by two well-established rules: Bergmann's rule, which describes the association between temperature and body size in natural environments, and the temperature-size rule, which describes reaction norms relating temperature to body size in laboratory experiments. Th...

Evaluating Explanations

Explanation-based learning (EBL) is a powerful method for category formation. However, EBL systems are only effective if they start with good explanations. The problem of evaluating candidate explanations has received little attention: Current research usually assumes that a single explanation will be available for any situation, and that this explanation will be appropriate. In the real world ...