Automating the librarian: a fundamental approach using belief revision

This paper describes a current research project investigating belief revision in intelligent systems by modelling the librarian in interaction with a literature-seeking user. The work is designed both to test a theory of agent behaviour based on belief revision proposed by Galliers, and to evaluate a model of the librarian developed by Belkin, Brooks and Daniels, through computational implementation. Agent communication is seen as motivated by and motivating belief changes, where belief revision is determined by coherence, combining endorsement, connectivity and conservatism. The librarian is viewed as a distributed expert system with many individual specialised functions operating in particular belief domains. The paper describes our first implementation of the belief revision mechanism and of a very primitive librarian, designed to test the basic viability of our ideas and to allow us to explore different forms of the distributed system architecture.