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A unified approach to handling uncertainty during cooperative consultations

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PRICAI'96: Topics in Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 1996)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1114))

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a unified approach to handling uncertainty during plan inference in cooperative consultations. This approach assists with the following aspects of the plan inference process: inferring a user's intentions among a number of possibilities, deciding whether to admit an unlikely interpretation of the user's request or to actively acquire information from the user, determining whether a perceived ambiguity in a user's request is to be resolved by heuristics or by soliciting information from the user, and deciding whether a recognized intention is sufficiently detailed so that a plan may be proposed to satisfy it. We define an information-theoretic measure which allows us to determine the amount of information in an interpretation of a user's request, and show how this measure is combined with probabilities of interpretations to give preference to interpretations that are better defined. Our approach is implemented as part of a computerized consultant that operates as a travel agent.

The permission of the Director of Telstra Research Laboratories to publish this work is gratefully acknowledged.

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Norman Foo Randy Goebel

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Raskutti, B., Zukerman, I. (1996). A unified approach to handling uncertainty during cooperative consultations. In: Foo, N., Goebel, R. (eds) PRICAI'96: Topics in Artificial Intelligence. PRICAI 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1114. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61532-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61532-6_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61532-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68729-0

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