{"paper":{"title":"WatChat: Explaining perplexing programs by debugging mental models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.HC"],"primary_cat":"cs.PL","authors_text":"Adrian Weller, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Joshua Tenenbaum, Kartik Chandra, Katherine M. Collins, Rachit Nigam, Tony Chen, Tzu-Mao Li, Will Crichton","submitted_at":"2024-03-08T14:10:25Z","abstract_excerpt":"Often, a good explanation for a program's unexpected behavior is a bug in the programmer's code. But sometimes, an even better explanation is a bug in the programmer's mental model of the language or API they are using. Instead of merely debugging our current code (\"giving the programmer a fish\"), what if our tools could directly debug our mental models (\"teaching the programmer to fish\")? In this paper, we apply recent ideas from computational cognitive science to offer a principled framework for doing exactly that. Given a \"why?\" question about a program, we automatically infer potential mis"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2403.05334","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2403.05334/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}