Ontology-Based Reflective Communication for Shared Human-AI Recognition of Emergent Collaboration Patterns

When humans and AI-agents collaborate, they need to continuously learn about each other and the task. We propose a Team Design Pattern that utilizes adaptivity in the behavior of human and agent team partners, causing new Collaboration Patterns to emerge. Human-AI Co-Learning takes place when partners can formalize recognized patterns of collaboration in a commonly shared language, and can communicate with each other about these patterns. For this, we developed an ontology of Collaboration Patterns. An accompanying Graphical User Interface (GUI) enables partners to formalize and refine Collaboration Patterns, which can then be communicated to the partner. The ontology was evaluated empirically with human participants who viewed video recordings of joint human-agent activities. Participants were requested to identify Collaboration Patterns in the footage, and to formalize patterns by using the ontology’s GUI. Results show that the ontology supports humans to recognize and define Collaboration Patterns successfully. To improve the ontology, it is suggested to include pre- and post-conditions of tasks, as well as parallel actions of team members.