COLLAGEN: When Agents Collaborate with People

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COLLAGEN When Agents Collaborate with People

• Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner

Presented by Daniel Schulman
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What is Collagen?

• A toolkit for building applications that use
  collaborative discourse.

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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

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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.

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Sample Application Travel Advisor
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Critique - Collagen

• A very useful, well-thought out toolkit
• Doesnt require natural language processing so
  it doesnt 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.

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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, whats app-specific?
• Sample app doesnt help from wrong POV.

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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?