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12
A Semantics for Speech Acts
- Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
, 1998
"... Speech act theory is important not only in Linguistics, but also in Computer Science. It has applications in Distributed Computing, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Electronic Data Interchange protocols. While much research into speech acts has been done, one asp ..."
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Speech act theory is important not only in Linguistics, but also in Computer Science. It has applications in Distributed Computing, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Electronic Data Interchange protocols. While much research into speech acts has been done, one aspect of them that has largely been ignored is their semantics, i.e., their conditions of satisfaction. A formal semantics for speech acts is motivated and presented here that relates their satisfaction to the intentions, know-how, and actions of the participating agents. This makes it possible to state several potentially useful constraints on communication and provides a basis for checking their consistency. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Second Meeting on the Mathematics of Language, Tarrytown, NY, May 1991. Some parts of this paper overlap with [23]. y This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (through grant # IRI-8945845 to the Center for Co...
Towards a formal theory of communication for multi-agent systems
- In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91
, 1991
"... Agents in multiagent systems interact to a large extent by communicating. Such communication may be fruitfully studied from the point of view of speech act theory. In order for multiagent systems to be formally and rigorously designed and analyzed, a semantics of speech acts that gives their objecti ..."
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Cited by 35 (5 self)
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Agents in multiagent systems interact to a large extent by communicating. Such communication may be fruitfully studied from the point of view of speech act theory. In order for multiagent systems to be formally and rigorously designed and analyzed, a semantics of speech acts that gives their objective modeltheoretic conditions of satisfaction is needed. However, most research into multiagent systems that deals with communication provides only informal descriptions of the different message types used. And this problem is not addressed at all by traditional speech act theory or by AI research into discourse understanding. I provide a formal semantics for the major kinds of speech acts at a level that has not been considered before. The resulting theory applies uniformly to a wide range of multiagent systems. Some applications of this theory are outlined, and some of its theorems listed. 1
Multiagent systems
- Lectures in Artificial Intelligence 799
, 1994
"... Abstract Workflows are ubiquitous in business computing. They arise not only within an enterprise but increasingly across enterprises as well—in situations such as virtual enterprises and applications such as supply-chain management. Although the importance of workflows as a basis for understanding ..."
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Cited by 34 (1 self)
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Abstract Workflows are ubiquitous in business computing. They arise not only within an enterprise but increasingly across enterprises as well—in situations such as virtual enterprises and applications such as supply-chain management. Although the importance of workflows as a basis for understanding and automating business activities is widely recognized, current workflow practice leaves much to be desired. To a large extent, this problem arises because of the rigidity of current technology, which does not accord well with the complex, heterogeneous, dynamic environments in which workflows are applied. Agent technology promises to alleviate many of these problems and hence enable adaptive workflows in realistic settings. We consider interaction-oriented programming (IOP), an approach to software engineering based on multiagent systems that we have been developing. We focus on one aspect of IOP, which deals with social commitments and enables agents to flexibly enact a multienterprise workflow by entering into and behaving according to their commitments to each other. The agents can cancel or modify their base-level commitments only if they satisfy the metacommitments that then go into effect.
Flying Together: Modelling Air Mission Teams
, 1998
"... The problem of modelling air missions is part of a larger problem - simulating possible war-like scenarios in the air, sea, and on land. In modelling such military systems one is required to model the behaviour of various actors and the resources that are available to them. One aspect of this proble ..."
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Cited by 25 (2 self)
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The problem of modelling air missions is part of a larger problem - simulating possible war-like scenarios in the air, sea, and on land. In modelling such military systems one is required to model the behaviour of various actors and the resources that are available to them. One aspect of this problem is the modelling of a group of actors as a team and then modelling the coordinated behaviour of such a team to achieve a joint goal. In the domain of air mission modelling the actors are pilots who control aircraft and their behaviour is referred to as tactics. In this paper we present the approach we adopted in modelling teams and team tactics as part of the development of the Smart Whole AiR Mission Model (SWARMM) for the Air Operations Division of the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organization. In our approach teams are composed of sub-teams and adopt organizational structures. Such structures define the responsibilities of the sub-teams towards the mission to be achieve...
Intentions, Commitments and Rationality
- In 13th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
, 1991
"... Intentions are an important concept in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Perhaps the salient property of (future-directed) intentions is that the agents who have them are committed to them. If intentions are to be seriously used in Cognitive Science and AI, a rigorous theory of co ..."
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Cited by 11 (3 self)
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Intentions are an important concept in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Perhaps the salient property of (future-directed) intentions is that the agents who have them are committed to them. If intentions are to be seriously used in Cognitive Science and AI, a rigorous theory of commitment must be developed that relates it to the rationality of limited agents. Unfortunately, the available theory (i.e., the one of Cohen & Levesque) defines commitment in such a manner that the only way in which it can be justified reduces it to vacuity. I present an alternative model in which commitment can be defined so as to have more of the intuitive properties we expect, and be closely connected to agent rationality. This definition is intuitively obvious, does not reduce to vacuity, and has useful consequences, e.g., that a rational agent ought not to be more committed to his means than to his ends. 1 Introduction Intentions, along with beliefs and desires, are an important compo...
On The Semantics Of Protocols Among Distributed Intelligent Agents
- In IEEE International Phoenix Conference on Computers and Communications
, 1991
"... . The continuing expansion of distributed intelligent systems makes new demands on theories of communication in Computer Science. It is customary to describe the individual nodes or agents in an intelligent system in terms of higher level concepts like intentions, know-how and beliefs. However, curr ..."
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. The continuing expansion of distributed intelligent systems makes new demands on theories of communication in Computer Science. It is customary to describe the individual nodes or agents in an intelligent system in terms of higher level concepts like intentions, know-how and beliefs. However, current theories of the communication among such agents provide no form of a formal or rigorous semantics for the messages exchanged at a corresponding level of abstraction--- they either concern themselves with implementational details or address what is, for artificial systems, an irrelevant aspect of the problem. A recent theory of communication that gives the objective model-theoretic semantics for speech acts is applied to this problem. This allows the important properties of protocols to be formalized abstractly, i.e., at the level of the application, not of the implementation. Further constraints on "good" designs can also be stated, which simplify the requirements imposed on the member a...
Skills and Capabilities in Real-Time Team Formation
, 1992
"... A rational agent can be viewed as a system embedded in the real world, continuously receiving perceptual input from the real world and responding by taking actions that affect the world. Such rational agents cooperating with each other is a natural extension of the single agent paradigm and will ..."
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Cited by 5 (3 self)
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A rational agent can be viewed as a system embedded in the real world, continuously receiving perceptual input from the real world and responding by taking actions that affect the world. Such rational agents cooperating with each other is a natural extension of the single agent paradigm and will be called planned team activity. Some of the issues involved in planned team activity include, forming the right team for carrying out a given task (team formation); establishing joint mental attitudes such as mutual beliefs, joint goals, and joint intentions (mind-set synchronization); and coordination and synchronization involved in executing a joint plan (joint plan execution). In this paper, we primarily address issues related to team formation.
Logics of Mental Attitudes in AI
- In Lakemeyer and Nebel
, 1994
"... . There has been a growing interest in AI in formal, qualitative models of various mental attitudes, starting with the well-researched concepts of knowledge and belief, and continuing with more exotic notions such as goals and intentions. In this initial survey we take stock of the work carried out ..."
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Cited by 5 (0 self)
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. There has been a growing interest in AI in formal, qualitative models of various mental attitudes, starting with the well-researched concepts of knowledge and belief, and continuing with more exotic notions such as goals and intentions. In this initial survey we take stock of the work carried out so far in this field, including the motivation for this line of research, the mental attitudes considered, those not, the (primarily logical) tools used, and some of the outstanding problems. 1 Introduction In this paper we review work on formal, qualitative, explicit models of mental attitudes, as studied in recent years in AI. By `mental attitudes' we mean notions such as knowledge, belief, desires, goals, and so on -- those notions, usually attributed to humans, which are generally associated with people's mental life. We use the term `mental state' to denote the collection of all mental attitudes of an agent. Why does AI care about theories of mental state? To start with, to the extent ...
Modeling Capabilities and Workload in Intelligent Agents for Simulating Teamwork
- Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci'02
"... The ability of members on a team to reason about each others' capabilities and workload is important for effective teamwork. This is required for proper task allocation and load balancing, as well as many other team processes such as adaptivehess, proactive assistance, and backing-up behavior. ..."
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Cited by 3 (0 self)
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The ability of members on a team to reason about each others' capabilities and workload is important for effective teamwork. This is required for proper task allocation and load balancing, as well as many other team processes such as adaptivehess, proactive assistance, and backing-up behavior. The present work proposes to incorporate capability reasoning into intelligent agents to produce better teamwork simulations, to work better with humans as virtual team members, and to facilitate team training. However, classical models of capabilities in computational systems and intelligent agents are inadequate for representing the more complex aspects of human performance, such as the ability to perform multiple tasks in parallel, interference among these tasks, effects of limits on attention and other cognitive resources, and the ability of humans to dynamically adjust their level of effort on tasks. In this paper, we present a formal mathematical model of capabilities that accounts for these effects. The model posits finite pools of internal resources, for which tasks compete; quality of performance depends on the amount of resources allocated. Capabilities are defined according to whether a feasible schedule can be found that allows a set of tasks to be completed within given constraints (e.g. deadlines) while not exceeding the capacity of any internal resource. An extension of the model is then proposed to incorporate multiple resources.
On the Commitments and Precommitments of Limited Agents
- Proceedings of the IJCAI-91 Workshop on Theoretical and Practical Design of Rational Agents
, 1991
"... Rationality is an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy. ..."
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Rationality is an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy.