[apologies for cross postings]

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Call for Papers

** Special Issue on Explanation **
http://on-explanation.net/on-explanation.net/Journal_KI.html

Journal KI - Kuenstliche Intelligenz
http://www.kuenstliche-intelligenz.de/

Deadline for Announcement of Submission: 25 November 2007
Deadline for Full Paper Submission: 1 February 2008

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The explanation concept is an umbrella term that covers quite a
variety of instances and variations. The term is used in many
disciplines for very different reasons, e.g., in cognitive science,
law, education, communication science, political sciences, etc. In
addition, many disciplines such as medicine have developed their
own style and culture for explanations.

All these kinds of explanation have in common that they are part of
communication. Communication takes place among agents, which can be
human as well as software agents. Communication has always a certain
purpose and this should be a guideline for the explanation, because
it provides a way for evaluation the success of the explanation.
Evaluation criteria can therefore be of different character.

For several reasons computer support is needed, as in general for
socio-technical processes.

Furthermore it is clear that meaningful explanations require a
certain amount of intelligence and therefore artificial intelligence
(AI) is challenged. Already around in 1990ies explanations in expert
systems have been popular. Their purpose was to increase the
acceptance of results of expert systems, e.g., by justification of
unexpected consequences. The technique applied at that time was
mainly parsing by going backwards through the chain of arguments.
With this method, however, many results could not be explained.
Today the time seems to be right going towards a more comprehensive
approach.


Theoretical Aspects
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In this category one finds a number of principal questions that deal
with the nature and the success of explanations and provide the basis
for computer support. We mention some:
- Cognitive background
- Objective of explanations (e.g. instruction, convincing someone)
- Explanation and understanding
- Explanation and acceptance
- Explanation and teaching
- Details versus generality
- The role of explanation in dialogues
- The presentation of explanations: how can explanations be
presented? How do user characteristics influence the way
explanations are presented?
- Explanation and influence factors
- Explanations and decisions
- From the cognitive to the formal
- Explanation and truth: Has an explanation to be exact or has it
even to be true? Can an explanation with lies be successful? Do
they need to be lies under certain circumstances in order to make
communication successful?
- Explanations as parts of processes and for improving them
- Explanations and experiences: have they to be generated ad-hoc or
can one use experience (CBR technology)?
- Purpose, success and evaluation of explanations
- Explanation and procedural programs


Practical Tasks and Systems
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Explanations in special disciplines
- Law
- Medicine
- Natural Sciences
- Software Engineering
- PR, Marketing

Practical structural questions:
- Explanation and Knowledge Management
- Explanation and CBR
- Integration of explanation into reasoning processes


Contributions
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Contributions to all mentioned subjects are welcome. Because
explanations cannot be regarded in isolation it is of central
interest to study the integration into a context. For practical
systems it is of interest to see how this integration is
performed and what the role of explanation is. For that,
reported experiences are of importance.

In all we hope to get a better understanding for this subject
that is so central for (intelligent) communication.


Submission Details
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Contributions to all submission categories of the Journal are
welcome (scientific contributions/state of the art overviews,
project reports, book reviews, summaries of PhD theses, discussion
statements, dictionary entries of interesting aspects). All
submissions should be comprehensible for a broader AI audience.

The submissions should describe original contributions, and should
not have been published or submitted elsewhere. Submissions based on
conference papers should be extended and should include a reference
to the corresponding proceedings. All submissions will be reviewed
by at least two reviewers. The maximal length of a scientific
contribution/state of the art overview is 7 pages in the final
format (incl. figures), 3-4 pages for project reports, and 2 pages
for the other categories. A LaTeX style file for the submission can
be found here:
http://www.kuenstliche-intelligenz.de/index.php?id=%3ANO-3015.
(The final version will be reformatted by the publisher.) Please
indicate the character count, your postal address, email address,
and phone number upon your submission.

More detailed information is available at
http://on-explanation.net/on-explanation.net/Journal_KI.html

For submissions, please directly contact the guest editors. We ask
interested authors to submit abstracts in advance.


Guest Editors
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Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer
German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence DFKI GmbH
Trippstadter Straße 122
67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
mailto:trb@...

Prof. Michael M. Richter
Universität Kaiserslautern
P.O. Box 3049
67618 Kaiserslautern, Germany
mailto:richter@...



--
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... 31st Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence ...
... Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 23-26, 2008 ...
... http://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de ...
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Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
Technical Director Project NEPOMUK - The Social Semantic Desktop
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
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DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
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Tel.: +49 (0)631 20575-133 Room Fax: +49 (0)631 20575-102
mailto:trb@... 3.17 http://www.dfki.de/~roth/
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