This paper discusses the application of a previously reported theory of explanation rhetoric (Maybury, 1988b) to the task of explaining constraint violations in a hybrid rule/frame based system for resource allocation (Dawson et al, 1987). This research illustrates how discourse strategies of explanation, textual connectives, and additional justification knowledge can be applied to enhance the cohesiveness, structure, and clarity of knowledge based system explanations. INTRODUCTION Recent work in text generation includes emphasis on producing textual presentations of the explanations of reasoning in knowledge-based systems. .
