Collaborating with Focused and Unfocused Users under Imperfect Communication

A totally focused user always finishes the current task or subtask before moving on to another. Typical users, however, sometimes shift back and forth between incomplete tasks and do not always communicate before doing so. This behaviour poses a problem for a software agent that uses plan recognition to support its collaboration with users. Our solution is a discourse interpretation algorithm which balances between asking too many questions about a user's intentions and sometimes being wrong about them.