Collagen: When Agents Collaborate with People

	We take the position that software 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 collaboration manager, called Collagen, and used it to build a collaborative interface agent for many applications. The benefits of this approach include application-independence, naturalness of use, and ease of learning, without requiring natural language understanding by the agent.
Participants
	Charles Rich Neal Lesh Candace Sidner Andrew Garland

Recent Projects
	COLLAGEN: Java Middleware for Collaborative Interface Agents Learning Hierarchical Task Models By Demonstration Intelligent Agents For Operator Training and Task Guidance Collaborative Spoken-Language Interfaces

Publications
	TR2001-24 Non-Verbal Cues for Discourse Structure Justine Cassell, Yukiko I. Nakano, Timothy W. Bickmore, Candace L. Sidner, Charles Rich (Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toulouse France, July 2001.) TR2001-03 Learning Hierarchical Task Models By Demonstration Andrew Garland and Neal Lesh (Submitted to 17th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, WA, August 2001) TR2000-40 Using a Model of Collaborative Dialogue to Teach Procedural Tasks Jeff Rickel, Neal Lesh, Charles Rich, Candace L. Sidner and Abigail Gertner (Proceedings of the 10th Int. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence in Education, San Antonio, TX, May 2001) TR2000-39 Collaborating with Focused and Unfocused Users under Imperfect Communication Neal Lesh, Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner (Proceedings of the 8th Int. Conf. on User Modelling, Sonthofen, Germany, July 2001) TR2000-38 [Best short overview of Collagen] COLLAGEN: Applying Collaborative Discourse Theory to Human-Computer Interaction Charles Rich, Neal Lesh and Candace L. Sidner (AI Magazine, Special Issue on Intelligent User Interfaces, to appear in 2001) TR2000-37 Task-Oriented Tutorial Dialogue: Issues and Agents Jeff Rickel, Rajaram Ganeshan, Charles Rich and Neal Lesh (AAAI Fall Symposium on Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications, Falmouth, MA, November 2000, Technical Report FS-00-01, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, pp. 52-57) TR2000-36 [Subsumed by TR2001-03] Learning Task Models for Collagen Andrew Garland, Neal Lesh, Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner (AAAI Fall Symposium on Learning How To Do Things, Falmouth, MA, November 2000, Technical Report FS-00-02, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, pp. 24-29) TR2000-30 Incorporating Tutorial Strategies into an Intelligent Assistant Jim R. Davies, Abigail Gertner, Neal Lesh, Charles Rich, Jeff Rickel and Candace L. Sidner (Int. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces, Santa Fe, NM, January 2001) TR98-23 Using Plan Recognition in Human-Computer Collaboration Neal Lesh, Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner (7th Int. Conf. on User Modelling, Banff, Canada, July 1999, pp. 23-32) TR97-21a [Subsumes the three conference papers below] COLLAGEN: A Collaboration Manager for Software Interface Agents Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner (User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Vol. 8, No. 3/4, 1998, pp. 315-350) TR96-16 COLLAGEN: When Agents Collaborate with People Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner (First Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents, Marina del Rey, CA, Feb. 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) TR96-14 Segmented Interaction History in a Collaborative Agent Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner (Int. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces, Orlando, FL, Jan. 1997, pp. 23-30) TR96-11 Adding a Collaborative Agent to Graphical User Interfaces Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner (Ninth Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Seattle, WA, Nov. 1996, pp. 21-30) TR95-12 Window Sharing with Collaborative Interface Agents Charles Rich (SIGCHI Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 1, Jan. 1996, pp. 70-78) TR93-18 Evaluating the Contribution of Discourse Theory to an Interactive System Charles Rich (AAAI Fall Symposium on Human-Computer Collaboration: Reconciling Theory, Synthesizing Practice, Raleigh, NC, October 1993. Technical Report FS-93-05, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, pp. 89-92)

Technology Areas
	Artificial Intelligence Spoken Language Interfaces Collaborative Interaction