If user interfaces are to reap the bene ts of natural language interaction, they must be endowed with the properties that make h uman natural language interaction so e ective. Human-human explanation is an inherently incremental and interactive process. New information must be highlighted and related to what has already been presented. In this paper, we describe the explanation component of a medical information-giving system. We describe the architectural features that enable this component to

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... generate subsequent explanations that take i n to account the context created by its prior utterances. ABSTRACT If user interfaces are to reap the bene ts of natural language interaction, they must be endowed with the properties that make h uman natural language interaction so e ective. Human-human explanation is an inherently incremental and interactive process. New information must be highlighted and related to what has already been presented. In this paper, we describe the explanation component o f a medical information-giving system. We describe the architectural features that enable this component to generate subsequent explanations that take i n to account the context created by its prior utterances.