Writer's Aid: Using a Planner in a Collaborative Interface

Abstract

Writer’s Aid is a collaborative system that works simultaneously with an author editing a document providing assistance in identifying and inserting citation keys and autonomously finding and caching potentially relevant papers and associated bibliographic information from various on-line sources. At the core of Writer’s Aid is a domainindependent planning system. The use of a planner in Writer’s Aid enables an efficient division of labor between a human user and the computer system that autonomously creates and executes plans for getting the bibliographic information while the author concentrates on writing. The collaborative model of human-computer interaction implemented in Writer’s Aid places new requirements on the planner, which must posess the expressive power to formulate complex planning goals, efficiently represent and reason about an incompletely specified domain, interleave planning with execution of partial plans, and dynamically re-plan in case of execution failure while avoiding redundant information gathering, all in real time. In the demonstration the participants will be able to use the system and evaluate its unique design in which information integration occurs within a context of a writing task that is the source of the user’s information need.