Collaborative Interagent Communication: Architectural Requirements

We have been investigating collaborative expert-consultation dialogues in which two participants (the executing agent and the consultant) work together to construct a plan for achieving the executing agent’s domain goal. Our analysis of naturally occurring dialogue and our search for an architecture for response generation in collaborative situations have led us to identify a number of features that must be captured in a collaborative response planner. This position paper discusses these issues and outlines our proposed architecture. We assume that the current status of the interaction is represented by a tripartite dialogue model [Lambert and Carberry, 1991] that captures intentions on three levels: domain, problem-solving, and discourse. The domain level contains the domain plan being constructed for later execution. The problem-solving level contains the agents’ intentions about how to construct the domain plan, and the discourse level contains the communicative plan initiated to further their joint problem-solving intentions. Our plan-based response generation architecture has been implemented in a prototype system and is being further developed to handle extended negotiation.