Architecture of a framework for generic assisting conversational agents

In this paper, we focus on the notion of Assisting Conversational Agents (ACA) that are embodied agents dedicated to the function of assistance for novice users of software components and/or web services. We discuss the main requirements of such agents and we emphasize the genericity issue arising in the dialogical part of such architectures. This prompts us to propose a mediator-based framework, using a dynamic symbolic representation of the runtime of the assisted components. Then we define three strategies for the development of the mediators that are validated by the implementation of experiences taken in various situations.