Affiliations: Centro de Informática - UFPE. Av. Prof. Luiz
Freire, s/n. Cidade Universitária, Recife-PE. CEP: 50740-540, Brazil.
[email protected]
Abstract: The emphasis on building co-operative/collaborative environments has
brought out the matter of group interactions. This, in its turn, has
highlighted the issue of conflicts, inherent to group problem solving. If well
employed, conflicts can act as triggers of cognitive changes, and thus help to
refine the group's solution to the task. In this paper, we present a
computational framework for detecting and mediating Meta-Cognitive conflicts.
The theoretical framework presented here enables a computational system to
analyse the ongoing interaction, to detect and mediate conflicts. In order to
do so, we consider our model of strategic changes, a model of the group, and
the history of the interaction. The objective of the mediation is to suggest
courses of action that provoke articulation and reflection, and thus lead to
more refined solutions. In order to diagnose which changes are happening to the
group plan we have built a model of strategic operations, which describes what
types of changes happen to a plan as well as how changes to one component of
the strategy (beliefs, intentions, ordering relations, context beliefs and
goals) impact the other ones. MArCo, our prototype embedding the artificial
conflict mediator, shows how our conceptual framework has been put to practical
use.