A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge

An agent, due to its circumstances, may decide to delegate tasks to others. The act of delegating a task by one autonomous agent to another can be carried out by the performance of one or more imperative communication acts. In this paper, the semantics of imperatives are specified using a language of actions and states. It is further shown how the model can be used to distinguish between whole-hearted and mere extensional satisfaction of an imperative, and how this may be used to specify the semantics of imperatives in agent communication languages. 1 Introduction To delegate is to entrust a representative to act on your behalf. This is an important issue for agents that may be forced, by their circumstances, to rely on others. Although autonomous agents have a high degree of self-determination, they may be required to achieve a goal that is made easier, satisfied more completely or only possible with the aid of other, similarly autonomous, agents. Obviously for delegation to b...

Abstract. The act of delegating a task from one agent to another can be carried out through the performance of one or more imperative communication acts. In this paper, the semantics of such imperatives are specified using a language of actions and states. The logical system that is developed then supports a notion of responsibility. An agent may not only be issued an imperative to directly carry out an event, or achieve some state, but also to be responsible for an event being carried out or state achieved- and these latter commitments might then be serviced through a subsequent act of delegation. The model thus clearly distinguishes between different classes of responsibility and different forms of delegation, and it is shown how this sound theoretical foundation can then be applied in specifying the semantics of imperatives in agent communication languages. 1

Abstract. We propose a novel interpretation of natural-language questions using a modal predicate logic of knowledge. Our approach brings standard model-theoretic and proof-theoretic techniques from modal logic to bear on questions. Using the former, we show that our interpretation preserves Groenendijk and Stokhof’s answerhood relation, yet allows an extensional interpretation. Using the latter, we get a sound and complete proof procedure for the logic for free. Our approach is more expressive; for example, it easily treats complex questions with operators that scope over questions. We suggest a semantic criterion that restricts what natural-language questions can express. We integrate and generalize much previous work on the semantics of questions, including Beck and Sharvit’s families of subquestions, non-exhaustive questions, and multi-party conversations.

. The meaning of a text can be generated by the composition of the meanings of all its units. The sentence meaning is not enough in itself and cannot be taken separately from the text context, it is a function of the text where this sentence appears. We propose below an approach which gives an account for this semantic phenomena. It is based on the minimal units of meaning following Harris's grammar, and the correlation of these units for a given text through the question/answer relations formalized by the set-of-answers reduction methodology stemming from the logic of questions. 1 INTRODUCTION AND VIEWPOINTS Making up and using text corpora are limited in several ways: ffl from a linguistic point of view, it is generally considered that such problems are beyond of its scope, and by the fact few original methods are built up. ffl in computer science, only statistical methods have been into practise in large-scale, but the relations between these properties and meaning are very com...

1.1 What is a Question? A number of logicians and philosophers have turned their attention in recent years to the problem of developing a logic of interrogatives. Their work has thrown a great deal of light on the formal properties of questions

Natural language question answering: the view from here