The Interplay of User-Centered Dialog Systems and AI Planning

Technical systems evolve from simple dedicated task solvers to cooperative and competent assistants, helping the user with increasingly complex and demand-ing tasks. For this, they may proactively take over some of the users responsibilities and help to find or reach a solution for the user’s task at hand, using e.g., Artificial In-telligence (AI) Planning techniques. How-ever, this intertwining of user-centered di-alog and AI planning systems, often called mixed-initiative planning (MIP), does not only facilitate more intelligent and com-petent systems, but does also raise new questions related to the alignment of AI and human problem solving. In this pa-per, we describe our approach on integrat-ing AI Planning techniques into a dialog system, explain reasons and effects of aris-ing problems, and provide at the same time our solutions resulting in a coherent, user-friendly and efficient mixed-initiative sys-tem. Finally, we evaluate our MIP system and provide remarks on the use of expla-nations in MIP-related phenomena.