Date: Wednesday, 15-Jan-97 00:23:14 GMT Server: NCSA/1.3 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Wednesday, 04-Dec-96 21:34:15 GMT Content-length: 4396 TRAINS Project Home Page

The TRAINS Project:

Natural Spoken Dialogue and Interactive Planning

The TRAINS project at the University of Rochester Department of Computer Science is a long-term effort to develop an intelligent planning assistant that is conversationally proficient in natural language. The goal is a fully integrated system involving online spoken and typed natural language together with graphical displays and GUI-based interaction. The primary application has been a planning and scheduling domain involving a railroad freight system, where the human manager and the system must cooperate to develop and execute plans.

Research in the TRAINS project has been along two tracks. First, the project has supported Ph.D. thesis research in natural language processing, speech interpretation, discourse processing, planning, and reasoning under uncertainty. Complete references are available from the resources given below. Second, over the course of the project we have periodically pulled the research threads together and produced limited but working demonstration systems based on the theories. The hope is that this incremental development is converging towards the ultimate goal of a fully conversant system. Details of these systems are also available from many of the references given below, and in particular in the JETAI paper.

Current research in the TRAINS project centers on an interactive route-planning assistant dubbed ``TRAINS-96.'' Details are available in a paper presented at the ARPA Spoken Language Technology workshop, and in a paper to appear in AIPS-96. Work in progress involves a more realistic domain and more complicated planning problems. We (still) hope to have a version of the TRAINS system running over the WWW in the near future.


Current Research:

For more information:

Also of interest:


Last change: 08 July 96 by ringger
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