Capturing the behaviour of inter-agent dialogues

Abstract

A multiagent system (MAS) is made up of multiple interacting autonomous agents. It can be viewed as a society in which each agent performs its activity, cooperating to achieve common goals, or competing for them. Thus, every agent has the ability to do social interactions with other agents establishing dialogues via some kind of agent-communication language, under some communication protocol [13]. Argumentation has been used to model several kind of dialogues in multi-agents systems, such as negotiation or coordination [1, 7, 8, 5, 9]. Our current research activities are related to the use of argumentation in agent’s interaction, as a form of social dialogue. According to [15], dialogues can be classified in negotiation, where there is a conflict of interests, persuasion where there is a conflict of opinion or beliefs, indagation where there is a need for an explanation or proof of some proposition, deliberation or coordination where there is a need to coordinate goals and actions, and one special kind of dialogue called eristic based on personal conflicts. Except the last one, all this dialogues may exist in multi-agents systems as part of social activities among agents. We also study the use of argumentation formalisms to model the internal process of reasoning of an agent, often called monologues. Our aim is to define an abstract argumentation framework to capture the behaviour of these different dialogues. We are not interested in the logic used to construct arguments. Our formulation completely abstracts from the internal structure of the arguments, considering them as moves made in a dialogue. We also consider multiagent systems as a set of multiple interacting autonomous agents.