Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner
The underlying premise of the CollagenTM (for Collaborative agent) project is that software agents, when they interact with people, should be governed by the same principles that govern human-to-human collaboration. To determine the principles governing human collaboration, we have relied on research in computational linguistics on collaborative discourse, specifically within the SharedPlan framework of Grosz and Sidner (Grosz and Sidner 1986, Grosz and Sidner 1990, Grosz and Kraus 1996, Lochbaum 1998). This work has provided us with a computationally-specified theory that has been empirically validated across a range of human tasks. We have implemented the algorithms and information structures of this theory in the form of a Java middleware component, a collaboration manager called Collagen, which software developers can use to implement a collaborative interface agent for any Java application.