Quantitative Modeling of User Preferences for Plan Recognition

Plan recognition is an important task whenever a system has to take into account an agent’s actions and goals in order to be able to react adequately. Most plan recognizers work by merely maintaining a set of equally plausible plan hypotheses each of which proved compatible with recent observations without taking into account individual preferences of the currently observed agent. Such additional information provides a basis for ranking the hypotheses so that the “best” one can be selected whenever the system is forced to react (e.g., to provide help to the user of a software system to accomplish his goals). Furthermore, hypotheses with low valuations can be excluded from considerations at an early stage. In this paper, an approach to the quantitative modeling of the required agent-related data and their use in plan recognition is presented. It relies on the Dempster-Shafer Theory and provides mechanisms for the initialization and update of corresponding numerical values.