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<Paper uid="P95-1019">
  <Title>Response Generation in Collaborative Negotiation*</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In collaborative consultation dialogues, the consultant and the executing agent collaborate on developing a plan to achieve the executing agent's domain goal. Since agents are autonomous and heterogeneous, it is inevitable that conflicts in their beliefs arise during the planning process. In such cases, collaborative agents should attempt to square away (Joshi, 1982) the conflicts by engaging in collaborative negotiation to determine what should constitute their shared plan of actions and shared beliefs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Collaborative negotiation differs from non-collaborative negotiation and argum_entation mainly in the attitude of the participants, since collaborative agents are not selfcentered, but act in a way as to benefit the agents as This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IRI-9122026.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> a group. Thus, when facing a conflict, a collaborative agent should not automatically reject a belief with which she does not agree; instead, she should evaluate the belief and the evidence provided to her and adopt the belief if the evidence is convincing. On the other hand, if the evaluation indicates that the agent should maintain her original belief, she should attempt to provide sufficient justification to convince the other agent to adopt this belief if the belief is relevant to the task at hand.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This paper presents a model for engaging in collaborative negoa~ion to resolve conflicts in agents' beliefs about domain knowledge. Our model 1) detects conflicts in beliefs and initiates a negotiation subdialogue only when the conflict is relevant to the current ta.~k, 2) selects the most effective aspect to address in its pursuit of conflict resolution when multiple conflicts exist, 3) selects appropriate evidence to justify the system's proposed modification of the user's beliefs, and 4) captures the negotiation process in a recursive Propose-Evaluate-Mod/fy cycle of actions, thus enabling the system to handle embedded negotiation sulxlialognes.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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