COLLAGEN: A Collaboration Manager for Software Interface Agents

Abstract

We have implemented an application-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen, based on the SharedPlan theory of discourse, and used it to build a software interface agent for a simple air travel application. The software agent provides intelligent, mixed initiative assistance without requiring natural language understanding. A key benefit of the collaboration manager is the automatic construction of an interaction history which is hierarchically structured according to the userś and agentś goals and intentions. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on Computational Models for Mixed Initiative InteractionThis work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. AbstractWe have implemented an application-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen, based on the SharedPlan theory of discourse, and used it to build a software interface agent for a simple air travel application. The software agent provides intelligent, mixed initiative assistance without requiring natural language understanding. A key benefit of the collaboration manager is the automatic construction of an interaction history which is hierarchically structured according to the user's and agent's goals and intentions. To appear in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Special Issue on Computational Models for Mixed Initiative Interaction.This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America. All rights reserved. Abstract. We have implemented an application-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen, based on the SharedPlan theory of discourse, and used it to build a software interface agent for a simple air travel application. The software agent provides intelligent, mixed initiative assistance without requiring natural language understanding. A key benefit of the co...

Human-GIS interaction issues in crisis response

“…Two promising alternatives are the conversational agency theory based on the BDI (Belief, Desire, and Intention) architecture of Bratman et al [8] and the collaborative planning framework of SharedPlan [34]. SharedPlan theory fits naturally to the modeling of intentional structures of collaborative discourse [45] and has been demonstrated by the Collagen system [65] to be a successful model for collaborative, mixed-initiative dialogues. Again, these theories and agent architectures have been partially tested in 'toy' applications, and we expect that crisis management systems require fuller implementation of the notion of cooperative problem-solving [2,9,37].…”

Collaborating with Focused and Unfocused Users under Imperfect Communication

“…Specifically, we have built an application-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen [10], based on the SharedPlan theory of task-oriented collaborative discourse [2,9]. Collagen is implemented using Java Beans.…”

“…The issues raised in this paper are motivated by our experiences using Collagen to build intelligent assistants and tutors in a number of different application domains, including air travel planning [10], email [4], and industrial equipment operation. For example, Fig.…”

A Flexible Framework for SharedPlans

“…These include an electronic commerce system, Hadad and Kraus [9], a collaborative interface for distance learning (DIAL), Ortiz and Grosz [12], and a multi-agent system for collaboration of heterogeneous groups of people and computer systems (GigAgent), described in Grosz, Hunsberger and Kraus [6]. SharedPlans theory is also used as the basis of the Collagen dialogue system, Rich and Sidner [15]. However, all these systems are special-purpose implementations of the theory for specific problems and do not provide a general implementation of SharedPlans, whereas our framework provides an architecture for implementing SharedPlans independent of any specific application.…”