Building respectful interface agents

To provide personalized assistance to users, interface agents have to learn not only a user's preferences and interests with respect to a software application, but also when and how the user prefers to be assisted. Interface agents have to detect the user's intention to determine when to assist the user, and the user's interaction and interruption preferences to provide the right type of assistance without hindering the user's work. In this work we describe a user profiling approach that considers these issues within a user profile and a decision making approach that enables the agent to choose the best type of assistance for a given user in a given situation. We also describe the results obtained when evaluating our proposal in the tourism domain, and we compare these results with some previous ones in the calendar management domain.