A plug-in architecture for generating collaborative agent responses
Charles Rich, Neal B. Lesh, Andrew Garland, Jeff Rickel · 2002
We describe an implemented architecture for programming the responses of collaborative interface agents out of easily composable and reusable plug-in components, and discuss the underlying theoretical and practical issues. The power of the architecture comes primarily from a rich representation of collaborative discourse state, which includes a focus stack and plan tree. The architecture also provides a useful separation between principles and preferences. We illustrate the use of plug-ins in a complex tutoring agent, which includes plug-ins that diagnose incorrect actions and explain why a step needs to be done. Plug-ins are part of the COLLAGEN agent-building middleware, which has been used by a number of researchers in addition to its developers.