Modeling a collaborative task with social commitments

Abstract Our goal is to design software agents able to collaborate with a user on a document retrieval task. To this end, we studied a corpus of human-human collaborative document retrieval task involving a user and an expert. Starting with a scenario built from the analysis of this corpus, we adapt it for a human-machine collaborative task. We propose a model based on social commitments to link the task itself (collaborative document retrieval) and the interaction with the user that our assistant agent has to manage. Then, we specify some steps of the scenario with our model. The notion of triggers in our model implements the deliberative process of the assistant agent.