Adaptive Provision of Evaluation-Oriented Information: Tasks and Techniques

Abstract

Evaluation-oriented information provision is a function performed by many systems that serve as personal assistants, advisors, or sales assistants. Five general tasks are distinguished which need to be addressed by such systems. For each task, techniques employed in a sample of systems are discussed, and it is shown how the lessons learned from these systems can be taken into account with a set of unified techniques that make use of well-understood concepts and principles from Multi-Attribute Utility Theoryand Bayesian networks. These techniques are illustrated as realized in the dialog system PRAC- MA. During the past two decades, a number of AI systems have been developed whose overall task can be characterized as evaluation-oriented information provision: The user (to be called the evaluator, or E) has the goal of making evaluative judgments about one or more objects; the system (or information-provider, I) supplies E with information to help E make these judgments. Table 1 lis...