Intelligent Agents as a Basis for Natural Language Interfaces

The agent component of UC is UCEgo. UCEgo provides UC with its own goal and plans. By adopting different goals in different situations, UCEgo creates and executes different plans, enabling it to interact appropriately with the user. UCEgo adopts goals from its themes, adopts sub-goals during planning, and adopts meta-goals for dealing with goal interactions. It also adopts goals when it notices that the user either lacks necessary knowledge, or has incorrect beliefs. In these cases, UCEgo plans to volunteer information or correct the user's misconception as appropriate. These plans are prestored skeletal plans that are indexed under the types of situations in which they are typically useful. Plan suggestion situations include the goal which the plan is used to achieve, the preconditions of the plan, and appropriateness conditions for the plan. Indexing plans by situations improves efficiency and allows UC to respond appropriately to the user in real time. Detecting situations in which a plan should be suggested or a goal adopted is implemented using if-- detected daemons.