Constructing and Utilizing a Model of User Preferences in Collaborative Consultation Dialogues

A natural language collaborative consultation system must take user preferences into account. A model of user preferences allows a system to appropriately evaluate alternatives using criteria of importance to the user. Additionally, decision research suggests both that an accurate model of user preferences could enable the system to improve a user's decision-making by ensuring that all important alternatives are considered, and that such a model of user preferences must be built dynamically by observing the user's actions during the decision-making process. This paper presents two strategies: one for dynamically recognizing user preferences during the course of a collaborative planning dialogue and the other for exploiting the model of user preferences to detect suboptimal solutions and suggest better alternatives. Our recognition strategy utilizes not only the utterances themselves but also characteristics of the dialogue in developing a model of user preferences. Our generation strategy takes into account both the strength of a preference and the closeness of a potential match in evaluating actions in the user's plan and suggesting better alternatives. By modeling and utilizing user preferences, our system is able to fulfill its role as a collaborative agent.