Human-machine conversations to support mission-oriented information provision

Mission-oriented sensor networks present challenging problems in terms of human-machine collaboration. Human users need to task the network to help them achieve mission objectives, while humans (sometimes the same individuals) are also sources of mission-critical information. We propose a natural language-based conversational approach to supporting human-machine working in mission-oriented sensor networks. We present a model for human-machine and machine-machine interactions in a realistic mission context, and evaluate the model using an existing surveillance mission scenario. The model supports the flow of conversations from full natural language to a form of Controlled Natural Language (CNL) amenable to machine processing and automated reasoning, including high-level information fusion tasks. We introduce a mechanism for presenting the gist of verbose CNL expressions in a more convenient form for human users. We show how the conversational interactions supported by the model include requests for expansions and explanations of machine-processed information.