PNNL

Abstract

Conversation protocols are meant to achieve certain tasks or to bring about certain state of affairs in the world. Therefore, one may identify the landmarks or the state of affairs that must be brought about during the execution of a protocol in order to achieve its goal. Accordingly, the most important aspect of protocols is these landmarks rather than the communicative actions needed to achieve the landmarks. We show that families of conversation protocols can be expressed formally as partially ordered landmarks where each landmark is characterized by propositions that are true in the state represented by that landmark. Dialogue in natural languages is regarded as joint activity. Conversation protocols in multi-agent systems are treated as dialogue templates and are composed using speech acts from natural language dialogues. As such, we treat conversation protocols as joint action expressions and gainfully apply existing formal theories of dialogue, specifically the Joint Intention Theory, to protocols and their compositions. Conversation protocols may require agents to communicate with groups as well as individuals. However, most contemporary agent communication languages, notably FIPA and KQML, have either no provision or no well-defined semantics for group communication. Furthermore, the research on protocols so far does not correctly incorporate groups into the protocols. We give a formal semantics to group communicative acts and use it to handle group communication in a formal treatment of protocols.