Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Content planning systems generate explanations to achieve a communicative intent, often with respect to a particular audience. However, current research in con?tent planning does not take into consideration the fact that an addressee may stop paying attention to an expla?nation because of boredom or cognitive overload. In this case, the generated explanation fails to achieve the com?municative intent. In this paper, we present a computa?tional representation of boredom and cognitive overload, and cast the problem of content planning as a constraint?based optimization problem. The objective function in this problem is a probabilistic function of a user's beliefs, and the constraints Jire restrictions pl