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<Paper uid="A97-2003">
  <Title>Automating NL Appointment Scheduling with COSMA*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Motivation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations, and typically solved using communication in natural language (NL) by phone, fax or by mail. In general, cooperative interaction between several participants is required.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Systems available on the market allow for calendar and contact management. However, as (Busemann and Merget, 1995) point out in a market survey, all planning and scheduling activity remains with the user. Cooperative agent systems developed in the field of Distributed AI are designed to account for the scheduling tasks. Using distributed rather than centralized calendar systems, they not only guarantee a maximum privacy of calendar information but also offer their services to members or employees in external organizations. Although agent systems allow users to automate their scheduling tasks to a con-This work has been supported by a grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (FKZ ITW-9402).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> siderable degree, the circle of participants remains restricted to users with compatible systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> To overcome this drawback we have designed and implemented COSMA, a novel kind of NL dialogue system that serves as a German language front-end to scheduling agents. Human language makes agent services available to a much broader public. COSMA allows human and machine agents to participate in appointment scheduling dialogues via e-mail. We are concerned with meetings all participants should attend and the date of which is negotiable.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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