Responding to Users’ Informational Needs in Time-Critical Situations

This paper argues that effectively communicating information to users who are involved in timecritical activities requires specialized capabilities for evaluating situations, filtering out the appropriate information, and producing easily accessible output. Simply displaying advice under such circumstances is unlikely to have a significant impact since it requires having the user’s full attention on the system. An alternative is to reduce the amount of information presented by the system by adapting the output to the user’s intended plan. This can be done by evaluating and critiquing the user’s proposed actions in such a way that a critique is only given if there is a significant discrepancy between the user’s intentions and the system’s recommendations. This paper presents an approach to critiquing proposed actions during an ongoing process of planning and execution under critical time constraints. The problems addressed by this work include inferring the user’s underlying intentions, deriving communicative goals based on the system’s knowledge of the situation, realizing those communicative goals in natural language, and conveying them to the user.