EventMinder: A Personal Calendar Assistant That Understands Events
Dustin Smith · 2007
Calendar applications do not understand calendar entries. This limitation prevents them from offering the range of assistant that can be provided by a human personal assistant. Understanding calendar entries is a difficult problem because it involves integrating many types of knowledge: commonsense knowledge, about common events and the the partic-ular instances in the world, and user knowledge about the individual’s preferences and goals. In this thesis, I present two models of event understanding: Romulus and Julius. Romulus addresses the problem of how missing information in a calendar entry can be filled in by having an event structure, goal knowledge, and past examples. This system is able to learns by observing the user, and constrains its inductive hypothesis by using knowledge about common goals specific to the event. Although this model is capable of representing some tasks, its structural assumptions limit the range of events that it can represent. Julius treats the event understanding problem as a plan retrieval problem, and draws