Responding to User Queries in a Collaborative Environment

RESPONDING TO USER QUERIES IN A COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT* Jennifer Chu Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716, USA Internet: jchu @ cis.udel.edu Abstract We propose a plan-based approach for responding to user queries in a collaborative environment. We argue that in such an environment, the system should not accept the user's query automatically, but should consider it a proposal open for negotiation. In this pa- per we concentrate on cases in which the system and user disagree, and discuss how this disagreement can be detected, negotiated, and how final modifications should be made to the existing plan. 1 Introduction In task-oriented consultation dialogues, the user and ex- pert jointly construct a plan for achieving the user's goal. In such an environment, it is important that the agents agree on the domain plan being constructed and on the problem-solving actions being taken to develop it. This suggests that the participants communicate their disagree- ments when they arise lest the agents work on developing different plans. We are extending the dialogue under- standing system in [6] to include a system that responds to the user's utterances in a collaborative manner. Each utterance by a participant constitutes a proposal intended to affect the agents' shared plan. One component of our architecture, the evaluator, examines the user's pro- posal and decides whether to accept or reject it. Since the user has knowledge about his/her particular circumstances and preferences that influence the domain plan and how it is constructed, the evaluator must be a reactive planner that interacts with the user to obtain information used in building the evaluation meta-plan. Depending on the evaluation, the system can accept or reject the proposal, or suggest what it considers to be a better alternative, leading to an embedded negotiation subdialogue. In addition to the evaluator, our architecture consists of a goal selector, an intentional planner, and a discourse realizer. The goal selector, based on the result of the evaluation and the current dialogue model, selects an appropriate intentional goal for the system to pursue. The intentional planner builds a plan to achieve the intentional goal, and the discourse realizer generates utterances to convey information based on the intentional plan. This paper describes the evaluator, concentrating on cases in which the system and user disagree. We show how the system determines that the user's proposed additions are erroneous and, instead of directly responding to the user's utterances, conveys the disagreement. Thus, our work contributes to an overall dialogue system by 1) extending the model in [6] to eliminate the assumption that the system will automatically answer the user's questions or follow the user's proposals, and 2) capturing the notion *This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IRI-9122026. of cooperative responses within an overall collaborative framework that allows for negotiation. 2 The Tripartite Model Lambert and Carberry proposed a plan-based tripartite model of expert/novice consultation dialogue which in- cludes a domain level, a problem-solving level, and …

Content truncated to 500 words