COLLAGEN: When Agents Collaborate with People

Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner

Presented by Daniel Schulman

What is Collagen?

A toolkit for building applications that use collaborative discourse.

Concepts and Background

SharedPlans (Grosz & Sidner 90) Mutual beliefs about the collaboration.

Focus stack (of discourse segments) Keeps track of current attention.

Discourse interpretation algorithm What does action do to focus stack?

Discourse generation algorithm Focus stack + SharedPlans -> possible actions

Task Modelling

Domain-specific knowledge about the collaboration.

Artificial discourse language (Sidner 94): “Propose” and “accept” beliefs. Beliefs include SHOULD (goals) and RECIPE

Recipe: Can produce steps to achieve a goal. For flexibility, Collagen uses generators.

Sample Application – Travel Advisor

Critique - Collagen

A very useful, well-thought out toolkit: Doesn’t require natural language processing –

so it doesn’t require strong AI. Application-independent design makes it very

flexible – ex. Could use it for a telephone-based system.

Ability to add in application-specific code is powerful.

Critique – The Paper

Primary purpose of paper: To explain the architecture of Collagen. Not much justification/evaluation of architectural

choices.

Very confusing explanations: Tough to understand how pieces fit together. What parts are Collagen, what’s app-specific? Sample app doesn’t help – from wrong POV.

Critique – Future Work

Future work section is good, but: Collagen is meant to be a toolkit, not a single

application. To really evaluate it, it should be used to build

several different applications. What kinds of collaboration is it good for? What

domains?