Support agents that help users in their daily lives need to take into account not only the user's characteristics, but also the social situation of the user. Existing work on including social context uses some type of situation cue as an input to information processing techniques in order to assess the expected behavior of the user. However, research shows that it is important to also determine the meaning of a situation, a step which we refer to as social situation comprehension. We propose using psychological characteristics of situations, which have been proposed in social science for ascribing meaning to situations, as the basis for social situation comprehension. Using data from user studies, we evaluate this proposal from two perspectives. First, from a technical perspective, we show that psychological characteristics of situations can be used as input to predict the priority of social situations, and that psychological characteristics of situations can be predicted from the features of a social situation. Second, we investigate the role of the comprehension step in human-machine meaning making. We show that psychological characteristics can be successfully used as a basis for explanations given to users about the decisions of an agenda management personal assistant agent.

翻译：帮助用户日常生活的支助人员不仅需要考虑到用户的特点,而且还需要考虑到用户的社会状况。关于纳入社会背景的现有工作使用某种类型的情况提示作为信息处理技术的投入,以便评估用户的预期行为。然而,研究表明,还有必要确定某种情况的含义,我们称之为社会状况理解的步骤。我们提议使用社会科学中提议的情况的心理特征,作为社会状况理解的基础。我们利用用户研究中的数据,从两个角度来评估这一提案。首先,从技术角度,我们表明可以利用局势的心理特征作为预测社会状况优先性的投入,从社会状况的特点中可以预测各种局势的心理特征。第二,我们调查理解步骤在人类机器含义中的作用。我们表明,可以成功地利用心理特征作为向用户解释议程管理个人助理代理人所作决定的依据。