COLLAGEN: A Collaboration Manager for Software Interface Agents

We have implemented an application-independent collaboration manager, called Collagen, based on the SharedPlan theory of discourse, and used it to build a software interface agent for a simple air travel application. The software agent provides intelligent, mixed initiative assistance without requiring natural language understanding. A key benefit of the collaboration manager is the automatic construction of an interaction history which is hierarchically structured according to the user's and agent's goals and intentions