A Pragmatic and Semantic Unified Framework for Agent Communication (original) (raw)
In this thesis, we propose a unified framework for the pragmatics and the semantics of agent communication. Pragmatics deals with the way agents use communicative acts when conversing. It is related to the dynamics of agent interactions and to the way of connecting individual acts while building complete conversations. Semantics is interested in the meaning of these acts. It lays down the foundation for a concise and unambiguous meaning of agent messages. This framework aims at solving three main problems of agent communication: 1-The absence of a link between the pragmatics and the semantics. 2-The inflexibility of current agent communication protocols. 3-The verification of agent communication mechanisms. The main contributions of this thesis are: 1-A formal pragmatic approach based on social commitments and arguments. 2-A new agent communication formalism called Commitment and Argument Network. 3-A logical model defining the semantics of the elements used in the pragmatic approach. 4-A tableau-based model checking technique for the verification of a kind of flexible protocols called dialogue game protocols. 5-A new persuasion dialogue game protocol. The main idea of our pragmatic approach is that agent communication is considered as actions that agents perform on social commitments and arguments. The dynamics of agent conversation is represented by this notion of actions and by the evolution of these commitments and arguments. Our Commitment and Argument Network formalism based on this approach provides an external representation of agent communication dynamics. We argue that this formalism helps agents to participate in conversations in a flexible way because they can reason about their communicative acts using their argumentation systems and the current state of the conversation.
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