Volunteering Information -- Enhancing the Communication Capabilities of Knowledge-Based Systems

Cooperative problem solving systems support the solution of tasks which cannot be solved by the human or the computer alone. These systems need to be knowledge-based and require flexible communication paradigms allowing natural communication with both experts and novice users of the system. Natural communication (quite dtfferent from natural language) has to support mixed-initiative dialogues where information can be volunteered by the system and the user. In this paper, we present prototypical systems which assist users in rebooting a computer. REBOOTER is a rule-based system which guides the user with a strongly system-directed dialogue through this task. The use of this system has shown that the communication paradigm was too narrow to make it a worthwhile toor (especially for the expert user). The SYSTEMS ASSISTANT tries to overcome the noted shortcomings by allowing the users to interact with the system in a mixed-initiative dialogue, to volunteer information and to deviate from the system generated discourse structure.