Providing effective decision support: Modeling users and their requirements

摘要

The major premise of this paper is that in order for a DSS to be effective in a given problem domain, it is important to model the decision-making behavior of the user over and above traditional problem solving concerns. This is achieved by extending the traditional planning framework based on first-order logic to include modal logic. This extended framework is then used to represent beliefs and desires of the user, communicative actions performed by the user and the system, as well as the usual goals, task-related actions etc. The essence of this approach, then, is to view natural language utterances of the user of a DSS as speech acts which can be modeled using the extended framework; this view can, in turn, be used to interpret natural language utterances of the user.