COLLAGEN: when agents collaborate with people

We take the position that autonomous agents, when they interact with people, should be governed by the same principles that underlie human collaboration. These principles come from research in computational linguistics, specifically collaborative discourse theory, which describes how people communicate and coordinate their activities in the context of shared tasks. We have implemented a prototype toolkit, called Collagen, which embodies collaborative discourse principles, and used it to build a collaborative interface agent for a simple air travel application. The potential benefits of this approach include application-independence, naturalness of use, and ease of learning, without requiring natural language understanding by the agent. Superseded by TR97-21. First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Marina del Rey, CA, February, 1997, pp. 284-291 and reprinted in M. Huhns and M. Singh, editors, Readings in Agents, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 1997, pp. 117–124 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 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. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 1996 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139