Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of the processes which people use to generate questions for a type of interviewing task. Specifically, we analyze "story acquisition interviews" in which the interviewer is a knowledge engineer who asks questions of a domain expert to acquire material for a conversational hypermedia system. Such interviews have proven to be surprisingly difficult to conduct successfully. W e have identified a number of "local" strategies which successful interviewers use to develop coherent, interesting sequences of questions and we have positioned these strategies within a model which describes the global interviewing process. This descriptive model is an initial step towards a methodology prescribing how to perform these interviews effectively.