Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Outline

CDT: A Tool for Agent Conversation Design

Abstract

The design, implementation, and verification of agent conversations (i.e., multiagent sequences of language primitives which are intended to together achieve some goal) can be difficult and exacting, and often requires skills which agent developers do not possess. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a planned software tool that is designed to help developers with this task. Our proposed Conversation Design Tool (CDT) will be built as a set of extensions to an automatic theorem-proving framework, and so will be able to directly manipulate expressions in a variety of ACL semantics description languages. The CDT will also employ a variety of graphical representations, such as finite state machine diagrams and Petri net diagrams, to facilitate reasoning in certain specialized domains. Finally, the CDT will include a generative capability to automatically create conversation policy configuration files for KAoS-architecture agents.

References (14)

  1. Allwein, G., and Barwise, J. (eds.). 1996. Logical Rea- soning with Diagrams. New York: Oxford University Press.
  2. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words. Ox- ford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Barker-Plummer, D., and Greaves, M. 1994. Architec- tures for Heterogeneous Reasoning: On Interlinguae. In Proceedings of the First Conference on Inference in Multi- media and Multimodal Interfaces.
  4. Barwise, J., and Etchemendy, J. 1994. Hyperproof. Stan- ford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  5. Bradshaw, J. M. 1997. KAoS: Toward An Industrial- Strength Open Agent Architecture. In J. M. Bradshaw, ed., Software Agents. Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press/MIT Press.
  6. Bradshaw, J. M., Greaves, M., Holmback, H., et. al. 1998. Mediating Representations for an Agent Design Toolkit. In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Knowledge Acquisi- tion, Modeling, and Management.
  7. Cohen, P. R., and Levesque, H. 1995. Communicative Actions for Artificial Agents. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems. Greaves, M. 1997. The Philosophical Status of Diagrams. Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Philosophy, Stanford University.
  8. Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and Conversation. In Cole, P. and Morgan, J., eds., Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press.
  9. H. Van Dyke Parunak. (1996). Visualizing Agent Conver- sations: Using Enhanced Dooley Graphs for Agent Design and Analysis. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems.
  10. Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts. London: Cambridge Uni- versity Press.
  11. Shin, Sun-Joo. 1994. The Logical Status of Diagrams. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  12. Singh, Munindar P. 1998. Developing Formal Specifica- tions to Coordinate Heterogeneous Autonomous Agents. Unpublished.
  13. Smith, I., and Cohen, P. R. 1996. Toward a Semantics for an Agent Communication Language Based on Speech Acts. In Proceedings of the AAAI National Conference on Artifi- cial Intelligence.
  14. Stenning, K., Cox, R., and Oberlander, J. 1995. Contrast- ing the Cognitive Effects of Graphical and Sentential Logic Teaching: Reasoning, Representation, and Individual Dif- ferences. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10(3/4):333- 354.