TRIPS: An Integrated Intelligent Problem-Solving Assistant

We discuss what constitutes an integrated system in AI, and why AI researchers should be interested in building and studying them. Taking integrated systems to be ones that integrate a variety of components in order to perform some task from start to finish, we believe that such systems (a) allow us to better ground our theoretical work in actual tasks, and (b) provide an opportunity for much-needed evaluation based on task performance. We describe one particular integrated system we have developed that supports spoken-language dialogue to collaboratively solve planning problems. We discuss how the integrated system provides key advantages for helping both our work in natural language dialogue processing and in interactive planning and problem solving, and consider the opportunities such an approach affords for the future. Content areas: AI systems, natural language understanding, planning and control, problem solving, user interfaces