S.B. Christiansen and A.L. Cohen-Rose
IntelliMedia 2000+
Institute for Electronic Systems, Aalborg University
DK--9220 Aalborg ø, Denmark
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction story written by Douglas Adams that foresees an electronic guide to Life, the Universe and Everything. Together with The Digital Village, Douglas Adams's company, we define the capabilities of a modern version of the Guide: providing information in a contextual setting; using a third party interaction metaphor via software agents; and providing personality-based feedback to encourage the user to trust the agents.
Since a complete Hitchhiker's Guide is not possible with current technology, we prototype a Guide that can provide guidance over a more limited domain. Our Guide answers natural language queries about places to eat and drink with relevant stories. These stories are created by Storytelling Agents from a knowledge base containing previously written reviews together with more detailed information about the places and the food and drink they serve.
You can view the complete report of this project, or read the paper on this project, presented at CSNLP-8. Both of these documents are in Acrobat format.