Agent wizard: building information agents by answering questions

ABSTRACT

We present a question-answering approach where a user without any programming skills can build information agents by simply answering a series of questions. These resulting agents can perform fairly complex tasks that involve retrieving, filtering integrating and monitoring data from online sources. We evaluated our approach to building agents, which is implemented in a system called the Agent Wizard, by re-implementing a set of agents for monitoring travel that originally took four programmers roughly four days to implement. Using the Agent Wizard, the entire set of agents can be implemented in under 35 minutes.

REFERENCES

• 1: José Luis Ambite , Greg Barish , Craig A. Knoblock , Maria Muslea , Jean Oh , Steven Minton, Getting from here to there: interactive planning and agent execution for optimizing travel, Eighteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence, p.862-869, July 28-August 01, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
• 2: Allen Cypher , Daniel C. Halbert , David Kurlander , Henry Lieberman , David Maulsby , Brad A. Myers , Alan Turransky, Watch what I do: programming by demonstration, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993
• 3: Joseph C. Giarratano , Gary Riley, Expert Systems, PWS Publishing Co., Boston, MA, 1998
• 4: Tessa, L., Programming by Demonstration: Z Machine Learning Approach, in Computer Science. 2001, University of Washington.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Interaction styles (e.g., commands, menus, forms, direct manipulation)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
information agent, information integration, user interface