Joint conversation specification and compliance

Formal specifications of protocol-oriented agent interactions have focused mainly on the semantics of the constituent agent communication language (ACL). We argue that a proper theoretical treatment of conversations cannot be simply derived compositionally from the semantics of individual Communicative Acts (CAs). Accordingly, we develop a theory of joint conversations that is independent of its constituent CAs. We treat the process of a group following an interaction protocol as a persistent joint communicative action (JCA) by the group. We define compliance in a joint conversation and we prove salient properties of joint conversations. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]: Distributed AI General Terms Theory Keywords agent, belief, joint communicative action, protocol

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Shamimabi Paurobally, Michael Wooldridge
• Keywords: ATAL 2007, Constituent Agent Communication, Intelligent Agents, Joint Communicative Action, Joint Conversations