Handling Uncertainty during Plan Recognition in Task-Oriented Consultation Systems

During interactions with human consultants, people are used to providing partial and/or inaccurate information, and still be understood and assisted. We attempt to emulate this capability of human consultants; in computer consultation systems. In this paper, we present a mechanism for handling uncertainty in plan recognition during task-oriented consultations. The uncertainty arises while choosing an appropriate interpretation of a user?s statements among many possible interpretations. Our mechanism handles this uncertainty by using probability theory to assess the probabilities of the interpretations, and complements this assessment by taking into account the information content of the interpretations. The information content of an interpretation is a measure of how well defined an interpretation is in terms of the actions to be performed on the basis of the interpretation. This measure is used to guide the inference process towards interpretations with a higher information content. The information content for an interpretation depends on the specificity and the strength of the inferences in it, where the strength of an inference depends on the reliability of the information on which the inference is based. Our mechanism has been developed for use in task-oriented consultation systems. The domain that we have chosen for exploration is that of a travel agency.