An Analysis of a Welfare Eligibility Determination Interview: A Planning Approach

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 3

Cognitive Modeling

The purpose of this research is to identify strategies and plans used by welfare caseworkers in order to build an expert system to determine welfare eligibility. Here we use the framework of proposed by Hobbs and Evans(1979) to analyze the conversational plans of a welfare caseworker while conducting an eligibility interview. We study the plans used by the caseworker, show the interaction between goals and themes, and study the influence of constraints imposed on the interview by the statutory Welfare Eligibility Rules. We identify some of the pre-structured plans in this constrained conversational domain in our effort to define the range of choices available in a welfare eligibility interview.