. In this paper, we present the MAGMA approach to multi-agent systems, including a proposal of an integrative environment based upon the decomposition between agents, environments, interactions, and organisations. We then focus on the MAGMA work done for cognitive agents, and we detail the interactions between such agents. We propose an Interaction Language associated with Interaction Protocols. A range from simple to complex interaction protocols is then presented. We illustrate the use of these interaction protocols for social and individual control issues in several application domains. We finally discuss our choices and future work. All this brings us at a stage where there is clearly still much work to do, but where we hope to dispose of an interesting framework, inspired by interdisciplinary studies, to approach effective Agent Oriented Programming. 1 Introduction 1.1 The MAGMA Approach By localising the intelligence of the systems in the components and between the components of ...

In this paper we discuss the use of multi-layered tagsets for dialogue acts, in the context of dialogue understanding for multiparty meeting recording and retrieval applications. We discuss

There is currently a broad interest in dialogue acts and dialogue act taxonomies, and new uses, taxonomies, and standardization efforts continue to be proposed. This paper presents a discussion of issues that must be addressed in order to facilitate the shared understanding and use of taxonomies. The discussion is framed in terms of 20 questions, the answers to which will help make the meanings of taxonomy elements more clear to different communities of users.

this paper by the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant number DAAH 04 95 10628 and the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant IRI9311988. Some of the work described above was developed in collaboration with James Allen and supported by ONR/DARPA under grant number N00014-92J -1512, by ONR under research grant number N00014-90-J-1811, and by NSF under grant number IRI-9003841.

Ways of achieving two desirable characteristics of pragmatically oriented dialog processing are discussed: (1) Flexible cooperation among the system's modules maximizes the system's exploitation of its knowledge and of its reasoning capabilities. (2) The ability to take either (or any) of the dialog roles in its domain enhances the system's ability to anticipate and interpret its dialog partner's reasoning and behavior. Ways of attaining these goals are being explored in the system PRACMA, which models noncooperative dialogs between a buyer and a seller. Attainment of the first goal is supported by the multi-agent architecture CHANNELS, which has been designed specifically for natural language systems. Two attempts to achieve the second goal are discussed which have been realized in two different modules of PRACMA: bidirectional, role-independent dialog planning operators; and Bayesian meta-networks for reasoning about the dialog partner's beliefs and evaluations. 1 Introduction 1.1 ...

Traditionally, most human-computer interfaces are based on limited tactile input and audio/visual output, and even when the interface has been enhanced with speech, gesture, and haptics, this is often done to supplement (or compensate for) audio/visual output. Even the most interesting and elaborate work on forcefeedback does not seem to be yet envisioning the full expressive potential of physical contact, in particular, the "contact expressions" used routinely by people and animals in different contexts. People use contact expressions when other forms of communication are inappropriate or impossible, to supplement other forms of communication, or because the physical contact itself has significance. As robotic toys and embodied technological devices become smaller, more portable, more durable, and more commonplace, it is our belief that contact expressions will become an important area of interface design and will open up new areas of study for applied semiotics. This paper outlines an initial design taxonomy of basic contact expressions -- and describes a "contact cushion" we have built and tested to explore some of the potential for contact expressive devices.

This report discusses the use of multi-layered tagsets for dialogue acts, in the context of dialogue understanding for multi-party meeting recording and retrieval applications. We discuss some desiderata for such tagsets and critically examine some previous proposals. We then define MALTUS, a new tagset based on the ICSI-MR and Switchboard tagsets, which satisfies these requirements. We present some experiments using MALTUS which attempt to compare the merits of integrated versus multi-level classifiers for the detection of dialogue acts, and discuss some simple contextual features that are useful in this task.

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The paper aims to answer the above question basing, on the one hand, on the pragmatic analysis of metaphors ([5], [6]) and, on the other, on speech acts theories. Having discussed the points at variance I try to show that metaphor is not an illocutionary act in the sense as, e.g. ”to promise ” is. Instead it may be considered as a special super-force when special conditions are included in the definition of speech act. 1.

Abstract. The goal of this study is to describe an interaction sequence between a therapist and a patient. This sequence is extracted from a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapeutic session that was filmed and transcribed. The selected sequence meets a specific criterion: to observe and analyze verbal and nonverbal dialogue in a series of patient-therapist exchanges that encourage the patient to change his thinking about the cause of his symptoms. We seek to specify the interactive conditions under which a form is insight is produced that we consider the key and driving factor in all psychotherapy. Two types of analysis were conducted: a hierarchical semantic analysis and an analysis of temporal behaviour patterns using the THEME program. The results show that therapeutic interventions first result in a deconstruction of the patient’s initial point of view, followed by reinforcement of the patient’s new point of view by means of confirmation. In this phase of reconstruction, the patient is led to reinterpret his symptoms along the lines encouraged by the therapist. The analysis of temporal patterns shows that (a) the deconstruction phase involves