Knowledge Representation in the TRAINS-93 Conversation System
David R. Traum, Lenhart K. Schubert, Massimo Poesio, Nathaniel G. Martin, Marc Light, Chung Hee Hwang, Peter A. Heeman, George Ferguson, James F. Allen · 1996
We describe the goals, architecture, and functioning of the trains-93 system, with emphasis on the representational issues involved in putting together a complex language processing and reasoning agent. The system is intended as an experimental prototype of an intelligent, conversationally proficient planning advisor in a dynamic domain of cargo trains and factories. For this team effort, our strategy at the outset was to let the designers of the various language processing, discourse processing, plan reasoning, execution and monitoring modules choose whatever representations seemed best suited for their tasks, but with the constraint that all should strive for principled, general approaches. Disparities between modules were bridged by careful design of the interfaces, based on regular in-depth discussion of issues encountered by the participants. Because of the goal of generality and principled representation, the multiple representations ended up with a good deal in common (...