The TRAINS project: a case study in building a conversational planning agent

The Trains project is an eeort to build a conversationally proocient planning assistant. A key part of the project is the construction of the Trains system, which provides the research platform for a wide range of issues in natural language understanding, mixed-initiative planning systems, and representing and reasoning about time, actions and events. Four years have now passed since the beginning of the project. Each year we have produced a demonstration system that focused on a dialog that illustrates particular aspects of our research. The commitment to building complete integrated systems is a signiicant overhead on the research, but we feel it is essential to guarantee that the results constitute real progress in the eld. This paper describes the goals of the project, and our experience with the eeort so far.