Metareasoning, Monitoring, and Self-Explanation
Michael T. Cox · The MIT Press eBooks · 2011
Abstract. This paper seeks to extend notions of monitoring in metareasoning to include symbolic and linguistic expressions of self for purposes of communication and learning. The essay is intended to present a synthesis in plain language that challenges the agent community interested in metareasoning to consider what it means for a system to understand itself in any meaningful way. The basic claim is that if an agent truly knows what it is doing and why, it should be able explain itself to others using natural language or some other interactive mechanism with humans. To perform self-explanation it must be able to understand itself, and for this to occur it must monitor its own metareasoning and have an episodic memory that forms the basis of self. A further challenge is to incorporate self-explanation into an evaluation function that complements criteria based solely on action performance. 1