Communication between Trainer and Agent in Programming by Demonstration

One of the most natural ways to acquire procedural knowledge is to watch somebody performing a number of actions and try to abstract this observed action sequence in order to make it applicable to a wider range of situations. This abstraction process can be significantly facilitated if the performing agent gives additional hints e.g. on the reasons for choosing a particular action or dealing with some particular object. Doing so requires both partners—the observer and the “trainer”—to share some common knowledge about the domain and the task at hand as well as a common language to exchange ideas about the current situation. This paper deals with the communication problem in cases where the observer is a software agent that is to be taught some procedure in a programming-by-demonstration context.