Andrew Garland, Neal Lesh, and Charles Rich

1
Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during
Collaboration

• Andrew Garland, Neal Lesh, and Charles Rich
• Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

2
Introduction

• Successful collaboration requires that the human
  and the system each maintain an up-to-date model
  of the shared plans and goals
• What to do if the human makes a mistake or
  interrupts the activity (called
  non-contributors)?
• Infer intentions underlying mistakes
• Repair shared plan by adding recovery goals
• Generate utterances that (re-)establish mutual
  understanding about non-contributors and
  recoveries

3
Trace snippet involving recovery
User presses the engage button. (mistake) Agent
says Whoops, it was too soon to press the engage
button. Agent says Lets recover from pressing
the engage button. Agent says First, lets set
the engine speed to zero ... Agent says Weve
recovered from pressing the engage button. Agent
says Lets return to starting the engine
4
Two error-recovery criteria

• An agent must be able to indicate when recovery
  is needed, and which actions are part of the
  recovery
• Re-use as much of general-purpose capabilities as
  possible, e.g. when
• selecting method to achieve recovery
• deciding whether to take the initiative
• generating agent responses

5
Collagen
focus stack
plan tree
communicate
observe
observe
interact
interact
6
Example current discourse state
A
B
e
d
c
B A
c
Plan tree
Focus Stack
7
Related research

• Plan repair and adaptation (Alterman 88, Hammond
  90, Hanks Weld 95, Nebel Koehler 95)
• Intelligent tutoring systems (Conati et al. 95,
  Rickel Johnson 99, Rickel et al. 01)
• Probabilistic plan recognition (Bauer et al. 93,
  Charniak Goldman 93)

8
Summary

• Non-contributors are identified by relaxing
  constraints during plan recognition (part of
  discourse interpretation)
• Utterances are used to (re-)establish mutual
  belief about
• When recovery is needed
• Which actions are part of recovery
• Implementation re-uses many components that were
  built to handle normal behavior

9
Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during
Collaboration

• Andrew Garland, Neal Lesh, and Charles Rich
• Cambridge Research Lab
• Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

10
Another snippet involving recovery

• Later, in a similar context, the activity might
  go as follows

User presses the engage button. (mistake) Agent
says Whoops, youve made this mistake
before. Agent says You take it from here. User
says What next? Agent says Lets recover from
pressing the engage button.