Negotiation in collaborative activity: an implementation experiment

It is intuitive in many situations to view an interactive computer system as an agent with which the user collaborates. From this point of view, such systems will be easier to use (especially for novices) if they obey the same rules and conventions of collaborative discourse that people are familiar with from everyday experience. This note describes an experiment in progress that begins to systematically explore the potential contribution of discourse theory to the design of interactive systems. (See [2] for more information.) The long-term goal of this research is to develop a general-purpose collection of subroutines, data structures, and speci cations (i.e., a toolkit) that application programmers can easily use to add collaborative capabilities such as the following to any interactive application: