1. COLLAGEN: When Agents Collaborate with People Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner Presented by Daniel Schulman

2. What is Collagen? A toolkit for building applications that use collaborative discourse.

3. Concepts and Background SharedPlans (Grosz & Sidner 90)  Mutual beliefs about the collaboration. Focus stack (of discourse segments)  Keeps track of current attention. Discourse interpretation algorithm  What does action do to focus stack? Discourse generation algorithm  Focus stack + SharedPlans -> possible actions

4. Task Modelling Domain-specific knowledge about the collaboration. Artificial discourse language (Sidner 94):  “Propose” and “accept” beliefs.  Beliefs include SHOULD (goals) and RECIPE Recipe: Can produce steps to achieve a goal.  For flexibility, Collagen uses generators.

5. Sample Application – Travel Advisor

6. Critique - Collagen A very useful, well-thought out toolkit:  Doesn’t require natural language processing – so it doesn’t require strong AI.  Application-independent design makes it very flexible – ex. Could use it for a telephone-based system.  Ability to add in application-specific code is powerful.

7. Critique – The Paper Primary purpose of paper:  To explain the architecture of Collagen.  Not much justification/evaluation of architectural choices. Very confusing explanations:  Tough to understand how pieces fit together.  What parts are Collagen, what’s app-specific?  Sample app doesn’t help – from wrong POV.

8. Critique – Future Work Future work section is good, but:  Collagen is meant to be a toolkit, not a single application.  To really evaluate it, it should be used to build several different applications.  What kinds of collaboration is it good for? What domains?