Norms of Conversation in a Framework for Agent Communication Languages

摘要

In open and heterogeneous environments offered by the Internet,where agents are designed by different vendors, the development ofstandards for agent communication needs to keep abreast of new dynamicinteraction modalities. The objective of this paper is to contributeto FIPAu27s standardization effort by proposing a pragmatic approach tothe design of agent communication languages (ACLs) in which themeaning of messages is the combination of its semantics andpragmatics. First, we present a reformulation of FIPAu27s communicativeacts (ACL semantics) using a grounded specification language whichovercomes some of the usual problems attributed to FIPAu27s ACLsemantics. Then the ACL pragmatics aims to account for the contextualfactors that enriches the semantics, such agentsu27 roles, turn-taking, and the satisfiability of messagesu27 perlocutionary effects. We claim that the ACL pragmatics is bestspecified by means of norms related to agentsu27 obligations,permissions and rights.