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Cooperative Interface Agents 65

will only send a generic error message; this is what Eudora does at present if
the user tries to send a message without specifying any address. If, finally, the
user asks the agent to suggest how to correct the string and the agent is not able
to perform this action and is a critical helper, it will select and apply, instead,
another plan it knows.
3. Personality Traits’ Combination

In multiagent cooperation, an agent may find itself in the position of del-
egating some task or helping other agents. A theory is therefore needed to
establish how delegation and helping attitudes may combine in the same agent.
Some general thoughts about this topic may be found in [6]. In XDM-Agent,
the agent’s reasoning on whether to help the user ends up with an intentional
state—to perform an individual action, an entire plan or part of a plan. This
intentional state is transformed into an action that may include communication
with the user; for instance, an overhelper agent will interact with the user to
specify the error included in the string, will propose alternatives on how the
string might be corrected and will ask the user to correct it. In this phase,
the agent will adopt a communication personality trait—for instance, it might
do it in an “extroverted” or an “introverted” way. The question then is how
should cooperation and communication personalities be combined? Is it more
reasonable to assume that an overhelper is extroverted or introverted? We do
not have, at present, an answer to this question. In the present prototype, we
implemented only two personalities (a benevolent and a supplier) and we as-
sociated the benevolent trait with the extroverted one and the supplier with the
introverted.
The user’s desire to receive help may be formalised, as well, in personality
terms. If the user is a lazy, she expects to receive, from XDM, some cooper-
ationincompleting a task, evenif she wouldbeable to doit byherself (and
therefore, irrespectively of her level of experience):

Rule R3 ∀a∀g[(Goal U (T g))∧(Bel U (Achieves ag))∧ (Bel XDM (CanDo XDM a)) ⇒
(Goal U (IntToDo XDM a))].

If, on the contrary, the user is a delegating-if-needed, she will need help only
if she is not able to do the job by herself (for instance, if she is a novice):

Rule R4 ∀a∀g [(Goal U (T g))∧(Bel U (Achieves ag))∧(Bel XDM ¬ (CanDo U a))∧(Bel
XDM (CanDo XDM a)) ⇒(Goal U (IntToDo XDM a))].

Providing help to an expert and “delegating-if-needed” user will be seen as a
kind of intrusiveness that will violate the agent’s goal to avoid annoying the
user.