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Abstract
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Propose Interaction Protocol
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Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence

A Common Ontology of Agent Communication Languages

Profile image of Rossana DamianoRossana Damiano

Applied Ontology

Abstract

There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. These traditions, even if they share the idea of speech acts as operators with preconditions and effects, and agents playing roles like speaker and hearer, rely on completely distinct ontologies. Not only does the mental attitudes approach refer to concepts like belief, desire, goal or intention and is the social commitment approach based on the notion of commitment, but the two approaches also refer to distinct speech acts, distinct types of dialogue games, and so on. In this paper, we propose a common ontology for both approaches based on public mental attitudes attributed to roles. Public mental attitudes avoid the problems of mentalistic semantics, such as the unverifiability of private mental states, and they allow the reuse of the logics and implementations developed for FIPA compliant approaches. Moreover, a common ontology of communication primitives allows for the construction of agents participating to dialogues with both FIPA and social commitments compliant agents. The challenge of agent communication languages whose semantics is based on public mental attitudes, such as our rolebased semantics, is to define mappings from existing languages to the new one. In this paper we show how to map the two existing traditions to our role-based ontology of public mental attitudes and we show how it allows for a comparison. Moreover, to test the generality of our new ontology for agent communication languages, we show how to extend the social commitment approach to cope with persuasion dialogue too.

FAQs

sparkles

AI

What distinguishes the two traditions in agent communication ontologies?add

The study differentiates between semantics based on mental attitudes, exemplified by FIPA, and those grounded in social commitments, highlighting how each utilizes distinct primitives.

How does the proposed role-based ontology address public mental attitudes?add

The paper establishes that public mental attitudes are attributed to role instances, reflecting the beliefs and goals agents are accountable for during dialogues.

What challenges arise in mapping FIPA's communication to a role-based ontology?add

Mapping requires reinterpretation of feasibility preconditions, which traditionally mandate prior belief, allowing for more varied interpretations under public mental attitudes.

How does action commitment differ from propositional commitment in this context?add

Action commitments are linked to role-based goals, while propositional commitments are viewed as the beliefs attributed to roles, defining responsibilities in dialogues.

What implications does the role-based ontology have for agent interactions?add

By modeling interactions as role instances, the framework permits multiple dialogues, enabling nuanced dynamics such as bluffing or insincerity in communications.

Related papers

Role-based semantics for agent communication
Joris Hulstijn

Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - AAMAS '06, 2006

In this paper we illustrate how a role-based semantics for agent communication languages can embed the two main existing models of agent communication languages, respectively based on 'mental attitudes' and 'social commitments' semantics. These two models have been presented as incompatible approaches, but recently we illustrated for persuasion dialogues and using our normative multiagent systems framework, that they can be seen also as complimentary ones. Independently from our own multi-agent model, in this paper we illustrate for the speech act 'inform' how the role based semantics embeds the other two semantics.

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A new semantics for the fipa agent communication language based on social attitudes
Benoit Gaudou

2006

Abstract. One of the most important aspects of the research on agent interaction is the definition of agent communication languages (ACLs), and the specification of a proper formal semantics of such languages is a crucial prerequisite for the usefulness and acceptance of artificial agency. Nevertheless, those ACLs which are still mostly used, especially the standard FIPA-ACL, have a communication act semantics in terms of the participating agents' mental attitudes (viz.

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The Roles of Roles in Agent Communication Languages
Joris Hulstijn

2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, 2006

We consider agents having multiple communication sessions at the same time. We assume that FIPA semantics of agent communication languages can still be used when we attribute mental attitudes for each session, which we call the roles of the agents, and we assume that we have to distinguish the mental attitudes attributed to the roles from the mental attitudes of the agents. We consider several consequences of the distinction between the mental attitudes attributed to the roles and the mental attitudes attributed to the agent. First, in attributing mental attitudes to an agent or to one of its roles, we argue that only mental attributes are attributed to an agent's role when these attributes follow directly from the agent's communication. They are therefore public in the sense that every agent who has overheard the session, has the same beliefs about the mental attitudes of the role. Second, the moves permitted to the dialogue participants in the same dialogue game are based on the role only, such that different kind of moves can be specified in different types of dialogue games. Obligations are associated to roles related to institutions which can enforce them by means of sanctions. Third, expectations are based both on the mental attitudes ascribed to the agent and to the role.

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A commitment-based approach to agent speech acts and conversations
Marco Colombetti

Proceedings of the Workshop on Agent Languages and …, 2000

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A New Logical Semantics for Agent Communication
Jamal Bentahar

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

In this paper we develop a semantics of our approach based on commitments and arguments for conversational agents. We propose a logical model based on CTL* (Extended Computation Tree Logic) and on dynamic logic. Called Commitment and Argument Network (CAN), our formal framework based on this hybrid approach uses three basic elements: social commitments, actions that agents apply to these commitments and arguments that agents use to support their actions. The advantage of this logical model is to gather all these elements and the existing relations between them within the same framework. The semantics we develop here enables us to reflect the dynamics of agent communication. It also allows us to establish the important link between commitments as a deontic concept and arguments. On the one hand CTL* enables us to express all the temporal aspects related to the handling of commitments and arguments. On the other hand, dynamic logic enables us to capture the actions that agents are committed to achieve.

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ACL Semantics Between Social Commitments and Mental Attitudes
Rossana Damiano

2006

There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. In this paper, we translate both traditions in a different approach in which the dialogue state is represented by the beliefs and goals publicly attributed to the roles played by the dialogue participants. On the one hand, this approach avoids the problems of mentalistic semantics, such as the unverifiability of private mental states. On the other hand, it allows to reuse the logics and implementations developed for FIPA compliant approaches.

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DIAGAL: An Agent Communication Language Based on Dialogue Games and Sustained by Social Commitments
Philippe Pasquier

Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, 2006

In recent years, social commitment based approaches have been proposed to solve problems issuing from previous mentalistic based semantics for agent communication languages. This paper follows the same line of thought since it presents the latest version of our dialogue game based agent communication language -DIAlogue-Game based Agent Language (DIAGAL) -which allows agents to manipulate the public layer of social commitments through dialogue, by creating, canceling and updating their social commitments.

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Related papers

A Common Ontology of Agent Communication Languages: Modelling Mental Attitudes and Social Commitments using Roles
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There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. These traditions, even if they share the idea of speech acts as operators with preconditions and effects, and agents playing roles like speaker and hearer, rely on completely distinct ontologies. Not only does the mental attitudes approach refer to concepts like belief, desire, goal or intention and is the social commitment approach based on the notion of commitment, but the two approaches also refer to distinct speech acts, distinct types of dialogue games, and so on. In this paper, we propose a common ontology for both approaches based on public mental attitudes attributed to roles. Public mental attitudes avoid the problems of mentalistic semantics, such as the unverifiability of private mental states, and they allow the reuse of the logics and implementations developed for FIPA compliant approaches. Moreover, a common ontology of communication primitives allows for the construction of agents participating to dialogues with both FIPA and social commitments compliant agents. The challenge of agent communication languages whose semantics is based on public mental attitudes, such as our rolebased semantics, is to define mappings from existing languages to the new one. In this paper we show how to map the two existing traditions to our role-based ontology of public mental attitudes and we show how it allows for a comparison. Moreover, to test the generality of our new ontology for agent communication languages, we show how to extend the social commitment approach to cope with persuasion dialogue too.

View PDFchevron_right
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View PDFchevron_right
A common ontology of agent communication languages: Modeling mental attitudes and social commitments using roles
Joris Hulstijn

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There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. These traditions, even if they share the idea of speech acts as operators with preconditions and effects, and agents playing roles like speaker and hearer, rely on completely distinct ontologies. Not only does the mental attitudes approach refer to concepts like belief, desire, goal or intention and is the social commitment approach based on the notion of commitment, but the two approaches also refer to distinct speech acts, distinct types of dialogue games, and so on. In this paper, we propose a common ontology for both approaches based on public mental attitudes attributed to roles. Public mental attitudes avoid the problems of mentalistic semantics, such as the unverifiability of private mental states, and they allow the reuse of the logics and implementations developed for FIPA compliant approaches. Moreover, a common ontology of communication primitives allows for the construction of agents participating to dialogues with both FIPA and social commitments compliant agents. The challenge of agent communication languages whose semantics is based on public mental attitudes, such as our rolebased semantics, is to define mappings from existing languages to the new one. In this paper we show how to map the two existing traditions to our role-based ontology of public mental attitudes and we show how it allows for a comparison. Moreover, to test the generality of our new ontology for agent communication languages, we show how to extend the social commitment approach to cope with persuasion dialogue too.

View PDFchevron_right
Role-based semantics for agent communication: embedding of the 'mental attitudes' and 'social commitments' semantics
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2006

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View PDFchevron_right
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Joris Hulstijn

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There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. In this paper we show how the role metaphor can be used to bridge the gap between these two approaches. First, we show how dialogues can be modelled as games -a form of normative systems -and how mental attitudes can be attributed not only to agents, but also, in a public manner, to the roles of the game. The dialogue moves allow an agent playing a role to modify the roles' mental states, as specified by the counts-as conditionals (also known as constitutive norms) defining the game. The player of a role is expected to act as if it has the mental attitudes attributed to its role during the dialogue and to prevent its role's mental attitudes from becoming incoherent, as it does for its own private mental attitudes. Secondly, we show how roles as descriptions of expected behavior maintain the normative character of social semantics. Due to the bridge between the two approaches, results and tools from one approach can be used in the other one.

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Related topics

  • Applied Ontology
  • Agent communication language
  • Agent Communication
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