The TRAINS project: A case study in building a conversational planning agent
Abstract
The TRAINS project is an effort to build a conversationally proficient planning assistant. A key part of the project is the construction of the TRAINS system, which provides the research platform for a wide range of issues in natural language understanding, mixed-initiative planning systems, and representing and reasoning about time, actions and events. Four years have not passed since the beginning of the project. Each year, we produced a demonstration system that focused on a dialog that illustrated particular aspects of our research. The commitment to building complete integrated systems is a significant overhead on the research, but we feel it is essential to guarantee that the results constitute real progress in the field. This paper describes the goals of the project, and our experience with the effort so far.
- Publication:
-
NASA STI/Recon Technical Report N
- Pub Date:
- September 1994
- Bibcode:
- 1994STIN...9524193A
- Keywords:
-
- Conversation;
- Knowledge Representation;
- Natural Language (Computers);
- Planning;
- Real Time Operation;
- Research Management;
- Semantics;
- Speech Recognition;
- Technology Assessment;
- Voice Data Processing;
- Communications and Radar