"COLLAGEN: A Collaboration Manager for Software Interface Agents"

10/9/1998: [time not recorded]
[location not recorded]

Abstract: MERL--A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts -- When software agents interact with people, they should be governed by the same principles that underlie natural human collaboration. These principles have been studied and formalized by computational linguists, specifically in collaborative discourse theory, which describes how people communicate and coordinate their activities in the context of shared tasks. Collagen is an application-independent Java middleware package which implements Grosz and Sidner's SharedPlan theory of collaborative discourse. We are using Collagen to build experimental interface agents for a variety of applications, including air travel planning, email, resource allocation, and industrial control. The occasion of this visit to ISI is to initiate joint research with Lewis Johnson and Jeff Rickel (CARTE) to evaluate using Collagen to build pedagogical agents. Interface agents built using Collagen can provide intelligent, mixed initiative assistance without requiring natural language understanding. Collagen also automatically constructs an interaction history which is hierarchically structured according to the user's and agent's goals and intentions. As well as helping the user stay oriented during complex and extended problem-solving sessions, this structured interaction history supports high-level transformations, such as returning to earlier goals and replaying segments of the history. For more information about Collagen, please visit our home page: http://www.merl.com/projects/collagen

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006