Representation and Inference in the Consul System

Abstract

Users of interactive systems need a single cooperative interface for all of the services in their environment. The interface must behave in a consistent manner in understanding natural user requests and in providing explanation and help as required. The Consul system is designed to provide such an interface. Its natural interaction capability is achieved by mapping between detailed descriptions of users and systems in order to translate requests and provide explanations An interactive system of this Kind would be infeasible if the onus of constructing the knowledge base and inference techniques were placed on the individual service builders in Consul, service-dependent information is incorporated into the Knowledge base by semi-automatic acquisition, resulting in incorporation of the new Knowledge into the system's built-in abstract framework. This incorporation allows the service-dependent data to appropriately influence Consul's knowledge based mapping processes. The current Consul prototype demonstates natural request handling and explanation for a mail service 1.