1. Andrew Garland, Neal Lesh, and Charles Rich Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration

2. Slide 2 of 8MERL 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. Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration Slide 3 of 8MERL Trace snippet involving recovery User presses the engage button. (mistake) Agent says “Whoops, it was too soon to press the engage button.” Agent says “Let’s recover from pressing the engage button.” Agent says “First, let’s set the engine speed to zero”... Agent says “We’ve recovered from pressing the engage button.” Agent says “Let’s return to starting the engine”

4. Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration Slide 4 of 8MERL 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. Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration Slide 5 of 8MERL communicate interact observe Task-Oriented Human Collaboration observe plan tree focus stack Collagen

6. Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration Slide 6 of 8MERL d [B] [A] Example – current discourse state A B c e c Plan tree Focus Stack [A] e after user mistake d RF

7. Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration Slide 7 of 8MERL 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. Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration Slide 8 of 8MERL 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. Andrew Garland, Neal Lesh, and Charles Rich Cambridge Research Lab Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories Responding to and Recovering from Mistakes during Collaboration

10. Slide 10 of 8MERL Another snippet involving recovery Later, in a similar context, the activity might go as follows: User presses the engage button. (mistake) Agent says “Whoops, you’ve made this mistake before.” Agent says “You take it from here.” User says “What next?” Agent says “Let’s recover from pressing the engage button.”