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As indicated on the Project Background Knowledge page, the main purpose of providing visual support is twofold: to provide (1) support to a user to reduce their cognitive load (the amount of information working memory needs to process at any given time) and (2) an indication of the progress on the task that has been made thus far. Visual support will be provided by means of a webpage. This page aims at explaining how you can develop code for your MARBEL agent to create such a webpage.
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Although visual support is key because of the reasons listed above, it is also only meant to be just that: support that facilitates conducting a conversation with your conversational agent. Conversational interaction should be the primary modality of interaction! Requirement: You should develop a webpage which facilitates conversational interaction; in other words, your webpage design should recognize that speech-based interaction is the primary modality of interaction. As such, you should avoid using input-based interactive webpage elements such as forms, dropdown menus, or other elements focused very much on user input via a webpage. |
Having our agent build HTML
An important facet of our conversational agent is the visual support. While the way in which visuals are modelled in the agent may look complicated, there is nothing that goes far beyond basic HTML. We utilize a combination of Prolog, HTML and Bootstrap to generate dynamic webpages. Prolog rules are used to add a condition to a webpage (i.e. webpage X is shown when Clause Y is true). By means of these Prolog rules, we generate our HTML code. The HTML code is treated as a Prolog atom, essentially a string, that we manipulate with Prolog and generate with the rule. The HTML code is represented in Bootstrap format, which is also clearly illustrated by examples below or on Bootstrap's documentation website (Bootstrap Documentation).
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Prolog Advice: To manipulate strings and atoms in Prolog it is useful to look at documentation of the following built-in functions: atomic_list_concat, atom_concat, string_concat, append, and maplist here: https://www.swi-prolog.org/. The predicate applyTemplate is a defined predicate that will be explained below. |
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