Ontological Overhearing

Abstract. The collaboration between two intelligent agents can be greatly enhanced if a third agent, who has some understanding of the communication between the first two, intervenes with appropriate information or by acting helpfully without having been explicitly involved. The behavior of the latter agent, which is quite common in human interaction, is called overhearing. We present an agent architecture modeling the overhearing behavior. In particular, we focus on overhearing based on ontological reasoning; that is, the overhearer semantically selects pieces of communication according to his own knowledge (ontologically organized) and goals. In our architecture, overhearing is performed by a team of agents playing two different roles: the first role (overhearer) classifies the overheard communication according to a formal ontology; the second role (suggester) makes appropriate suggestions at the appropriate time point. We present a formal language for the interaction between agen...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Marco Aiello, Paolo Busetta, Antonia Donà, Luciano Serafini
• Keywords: ATAL 2001, Communication, Intelligent Agents, JACK Intelligent Agents