[Olympus developers 440]: Questions regarding the core agents in RavenClaw's DM Core

[Aitzaz Ahmad]

Hi,

     The documentation available on RavenClaw in that comes with the code
is  outdated. I've gone through the document itself and there are some
sections totally missing and there are others that need to be updated.
According to the document, the DM Core has six core agents: DMCore Agent,
Input Manager Agent, Output Manager Agent, Galaxy Stub Agent, DTT Manager
Agent, and the State Manager Agent. The document doesn't say anything about
the Output Manager Agent.

    When I checked the DMCore folder in the RavenClaw code, I found these 7
core agents instead: DMCore Agent, Output Manager Agent, DTT Manager Agent,
State Manager Agent, Grounding Manager Agent, Interaction Event Manager
Agent, and the Traffic Manager Agent.

    Now I can tell that the Traffic Manager Agent is the same agent that
was previously known as the Galaxy Stub Agent. I can also tell that the
Input Manager Agent has been refactored and is now the Interaction Event
Agent (this agent handles the input events and other interaction events as
well). But I can not make any sense out of the Grounding Manager Agent. I
don't have any clue as to what its role is (as a matter of fact, I don't
even know what grounding is!).

  My questions and concerns are listed below:

   1. What is grounding and what does the Grounding Manager Agent do?
   2. How does the Grounding Manager Agent interact with other modules?
   When is it called and who calls it? What operations does it perform?
   3. What is the purpose of the default output device in the Output
   Manager Agent?
   4. When the system has to generate a prompt, does the Output Manager
   Agent send the output to the NLG component only? (This means that the
   output from the dialog manager goes to the NLG, and it is the NLG component
   that sends the final utterance to the synthesizer for speech output. This
   is my understanding so far, please correct me if I' wrong.)
   5. Is the Traffic Manager Agent used for any other calls other than
   those made during the InputPass phase and the calls to a Back-end Agent?
   6. I haven't been able to spot the *process_parse* Galaxy Interface
   function in the code so far. The document says that this is the Galaxy
   Interface routine which is called by the Hub when it receives an input for
   the DM. Instead, all I saw was a *handle_event* routine in the Galaxy
   Interface code. The Hub.pgm file, however, lists both the routines
   distinctly. Where do I find the *process_parse* function?
   7. The documentation does not have an architectural diagram (the section
   is empty). I'm sure you must have some sort of documented form of the
   design of RavenClaw. I've asked for this thing before as well and I'm
   asking yet again; please if you have any form of design document or an
   architectural diagram please attach that in the response to this mail.

 Please do post a reply to these questions as they are critical to the
research work I'm doing.

Aitzaz Ahmad
----------
"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans
and a nice Chianti." Dr. Hannibal Lecter - Silence of the Lambs (1991)
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