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We take the position that autonomous agents, when they interact with people, should be governed by the same principles that underlie human collaboration. These principles come from research in computational linguistics, specifically collaborative discourse theory, which describes how people communicate and coor-dinate their activities in the context of shared tasks. We have implemented a prototype toolkit, called Collagen, which embodies collaborative discourse principles, and used it to build a collaborative interface agent for a simple air travel application. The po-tential benefits of this approach include applicationindependence, naturalness of use, and ease of learning, without requiring natural language understanding by the agent.