Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

On formalizing social commitments in dialogue and argumentation models using temporal defeasible logic

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Knowledge and Information Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper, we take the view that any formalization of commitments has to come together with a formalization of time, events/actions and change. We enrich a suitable formalism for reasoning about time, event/action and change in order to represent and reason about commitments. We employ a three-valued based temporal first-order non-monotonic logic (TFONL) that allows an explicit representation of time and events/action. TFONL subsumes the action languages presented in the literature and takes into consideration the frame, qualification and ramification problems, and incorporates to a domain description the set of rules governing change. It can handle protocols for the different types of dialogues such as information seeking, inquiry and negotiation. We incorporate commitments into TFONL to obtain Com-TFONL. Com-TFONL allows an agent to reason about its commitments and about other agents’ behaviour during a dialogue. Thus, agents can employ social commitments to act on, argue with and reason about during interactions with other agents. Agents may use their reasoning and argumentative capabilities in order to determine the appropriate communicative acts during conversations. Furthermore, Com-TFONL allows for an integration of commitments and arguments which helps in capturing the public aspects of a conversation and the reasoning aspects required in coherent conversations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Abelló A, Romero O (2011) Ontology driven search of compound IDs. Knowl Inf Syst. doi:10.1007/s10115-011-0418-0

  2. Alberti M, Daolio D, Torroni P (2004) Specification and verification of agent interaction protocols in a logic-based system. In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on applied computing

  3. Allen J (1984) Towards a general theory of action and time. Artif Intell 23:123–154

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Allen J, Hayes P (1989) Moments and points in an interval-based temporal logic. Comput Intell 5:225–238

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Amgoud L (1999) Contribution à l’Intégration des préférences dans le raisonnement argumentatif, PhD. Thesis, Université Paul Sabatier-Toulouse, France

  6. Amgoud L, Maudet N, Parsons S (2000) Modelling dialogues using argumentation. In: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on multi-agent systems, pp 31–38

  7. Assawamekin N, Sunetnanta T, Pluempitiwiriyawej C (2010) Ontology-based multi-perspective requirements traceability framework. Knowl Inf Syst 25(3):493–522

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Austin JL (1962) How to do things with words. Clarendon Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  9. Baldoni M, Baroglio C, Marengo E (2010) Constraints among commitments: regulative specification of interaction protocols. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pp 2–17

  10. Baral C, Gelfond M, Provetti A (1997) Representing actions: laws, observations and hypothesis. J Logic Program 31(1–3):201–243

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Baral C, Gelfond M, Provetti A (1998) Formalizing narratives using nested circumscription. Artif Intell 104(1–2):107–164

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Baral C, Son TC, Tuan L-C (2002) A transition function based characterization of actions with delayed and continuous effect. In: Proceedings of the eighth international conference on principles of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR’2002), pp 291–302. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos

  13. Bentahar J, Mbarki M, Moulin B (2006) Strategic and tactic reasoning for communicating agents. In: Third workshop on argumentation in multi-agent systems, 5th international joint conference on autonomous agents and multi-agents systems, pp 141–156

  14. Besana P, Robertson D, Rovatsos M (2005) Exploiting interaction contexts in P2P ontology mapping. In: Second international workshop on Peer to Peer, Knowl Manage, pp 1613–1673

  15. Brandom R (2000) Articulating reasons: an introduction to inferentialism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  16. Cao L, He T (2009) Developing actionable trading agents. Knowl Inf Syst 18:183–198

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Castelfranchi C (1995) Commitments: from individual intentions to groups and organizations. In: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on multi-agent systems, pp 41–48

  18. Chesani F, Mello P, Montali M, Torroni P (2009) Commitment tracking via the reactive event calculus. In: Proceedings of the 21th international joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), Pasadena, pp 91–96

  19. Chopra AK, Singh MP (2006) Contextualizing commitment protocol. In: Nakashima H, Wellman MP, Weiss G, Stone P (eds) Proceedings of the 5th international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS 2006) Hakodate. ACM, Japan, pp 1345–1352

  20. Chopra A, Singh M (2009) Multiagent commitment alignment. In: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pp 937–944

  21. Cogan E, Parsons S, McBurney P (2005) What kind of an argument are we going to have today. In: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems. ACM Press, Utrecht, pp 544–551

  22. Cohen P, Levesque H (1995) Communicative actions for artificial agents. In: Proceedings of the international conference on multi-agent systems, AAAI Press, San Francisco

  23. Chaib-draa B, Dignum F (2002) Trends in agent communication language. Comput Intell 18(2):89–101

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Dastani M, Hulstijn J, der Torre L (2000) Negotiation protocols and dialogue games. In: Proceeding of the Belgium/Dutch artificial intelligence conference, pp 13–20

  25. Desai N, Chopra AK, Singh MP (2007) Representing and reasoning about commitments in business processes. In: Proceedings of the twenty-second AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, AAAI Press, Canada, pp 1328–1333

  26. FIPA: (2002) (2002) FIPA communicative act library specification. Technical report, Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents

  27. Fornara N, Colombetti M (2002) Operational specification of a commitment-based agent communication language. In: The first international joint conference in autonomous agent and multi-agent systems, pp 535–542

  28. Francisco V, Gervás P, Peinado F (2010) Ontological reasoning for improving the treatment of emotions in text. Knowl Inf Syst 25(3):421–443

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Giordano L, Alberto M, Camilla S (2007) Specifying and verifying interaction protocols in a temporal action logic. J Appl Logic 5(2):214–234

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  30. Governatori G, Hoang D (2005) DR-CONTRACT: an architecture for e-contracts in defeasible logic. In: EDOC workshop on contract architecures and languages

  31. Guerin F, Pitt J (2001) Denotational semantics for agent communication languages. In: Müller JP, Andre E, Sen S, Frasson C (eds) Proceedings of the 5th international conference on autonomous agents. ACM Press, New york, pp 497–504

  32. Hamblin CL (1970) Fallacies. Methuen, London

  33. Hulstijn J (2000) Dialogue models for enquiry and transaction. PhD thesis, Universiteit Twente, Enschede

  34. Kalfoglou Y, Schorlemmer M (2003) Ontology mapping: the state of the art. Knowl Eng Rev 18:1–31

    Google Scholar 

  35. Kibble R (2006) Speech acts, commitment and multi-agent communication. Comput Math Organ Theory 12:127–145

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  36. Lance M, Kremer P (1994) The logical structure of linguistic commitment I: four systems of non-relevant commitment entailment. J Philos Logic 23:369–400

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  37. Letia I, Vartic R (2006) Commitment-based policies in Persuasion ialogues with defeasible beliefs. In: Dignum F, van Eijk R, Flores R (eds) Logic notes for artificial intelligence 3859. Springer, Berlin, pp 243–257

    Google Scholar 

  38. Lillis D, Collier RW (2011) Augmenting agent platforms to facilitate conversation reasoning. In: Lecture notes in computer science, vol 6822, languages, methodologies, and development tools for multi-agent systems, pp 56–75

  39. Mallya AU, Huhns MN (2003) Commitments among agents. IEEE Intern Comput 7(4):90–93

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Maudet N, Chaib-draa B (2002) Commitment-based and dialogue-game based protocols, new trends in agent communication languages. Knowl Eng Rev 17(2):157–179 Cambridge University Press

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. McBurney P, Parsons S (2002) Games that agents play: a formal framework for dialogue between autonomous agents. J Logic Lang Inf Special Issue Logic Games 11(3):315–334

    Google Scholar 

  42. McBurney P, van Eijk RM, Parsons S, Amgoud L (2003) A dialogue-game protocol for agent purchase negotiations. J Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 7(3):235–273

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. McBurney P, Parsons S (2005) A denotational semantics for deliberation Dialogues. In: Rahwan I, Moraitis P, Reed C (eds) Argumentation in multi-agent systems, lecture notes in artificial intelligence 3366. Springer, Berlin, pp 162–175

    Google Scholar 

  44. McBurney P, Parsons S (2007) Retraction and revocation in agent deliberation. Argumentation 21: 269–289 Springer

    Google Scholar 

  45. McBurney P, Hitchcock D, Parsons S (2007) The eight fold way of deliberation dialogue. Intern J Intell Syst 22(1):95–132

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. McBurney P, Parsons S (2009) Dialogue games for agent argumentation. In: Rahwan I, Simari GR (eds) Argumentation in artificial intelligence, 261. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0 13

  47. Moubaiddin A, Obeid N (2007) Towards a formal model of knowledge acquisition via cooperative dialogue. In: 9th International conference on, enterprise information systems, pp 182–189

  48. Moubaiddin A, Obeid N (2009) Partial information basis for agent-based collaborative dialogue. Appl Intell 30(2):142–167

    Google Scholar 

  49. Obeid N (1996) Three valued logic and non-monotonic reasoning. Comput Artif Intell 15(6):509–530

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  50. Obeid N (2000a) Towards a model of learning through communication. Knowl Inf Syst 2:498–508 Springer-Verlag

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  51. Obeid N (2000b) Fault diagnosis using three-valued based nonmonotonic logic. Intern J Cond Monit Diagnos Eng Manage 3(2):17–28 UK

    Google Scholar 

  52. Obeid N (2005a) A formalism for representing and reasoning with temporal information, event and change. Appl Intell 23(2): 109–119

    Google Scholar 

  53. Obeid N (2005b) A model-theoretic semantics for default logic. WSEAS Trans Comput 4(6):581–590

    Google Scholar 

  54. Obeid N, Moubaiddin A (2010) Towards a formal model of knowledge sharing in complex systems. In: Nguyen NT, Szczerbicki E (eds) Intelligent systems for knowledge management, studies in computational intelligence series. Springer, Berlin, pp 53–82

    Google Scholar 

  55. Obeid N, Rao RBKN (2004) Diagnostic temporal reasoning in model-based diagnosis (MBD) of dynamic system. Intern J Cond Monit Diagnos Eng Manage 7(1):13–28 UK

    Google Scholar 

  56. Obeid N, Rao RBKN (2010) On integrating event definition and event detection. Knowl Inf Syst 22(2):129–158

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Parsons S, Wooldridge M, Amgoud L (2002) An analysis of formal inter-agent dialogues. In: Proceedings of the first international joint conference on, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, pp 394–401

  58. Reiter R (1980) A logic for default reasoning. Artif Intell 13:81–132

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  59. Ribaric S, Hrkac T (2008) TeMS—a multi-agent system for temporally rich domains. Knowl Inf Syst 15:1–30

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Robertson D (2005) Lightweight coordination calculus for agent systems. In: Declarative agent languages and technologies, logic notes on computer science 3476. Springer, Berlin, pp 183–197

  61. Sadri F, Toni F, Torroni P (2002) Abductive logic programming architecture for negotiating agents. In: Proceedings of the 8th European conference on logics in artificial intelligence (JELIA’02), LNCS, vol. 2424. Springer, Germany, pp 419–431

  62. Searle J (1969) Speech acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  63. Searle J (1975) A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In: Gunderson K (ed) Language, mind, and knowledge (Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science VII). University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, pp 344–369

  64. Sensoy M, Yulom P (2009) Evolving service semantics cooperatively: a consumer-driven approach. Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 18:526–555

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Singh M (1998) Agent communication languages: rethinking the principles. IEEE Comput 31:40–47

    Article  Google Scholar 

  66. Singh M (1999a) A social semantics for agent communication languages. IJCAI’99 workshop on agent communication languages, pp 75–88

  67. Singh M (1999b) An ontology for commitments in multiagent systems. Artif Intell Law 7(1):97–113

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. Singh M (2000a) Synthesizing coordination requirements for heterogeneous autonomous agents. Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 3:107–132

    Google Scholar 

  69. Singh M (2000b) A social semantics for agent communication language. In: Dignum F, Greaves M (eds) Issues in agent, communication, pp 31–45

  70. Skylogiannis T, Antoniou G, Bassiliades N, Governatori G (2005) DR-NEGOTIATE—a system for automated agent negotiation with defeasible logic-based strategies. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on e-technology, e-commerce and e-service, pp 44–49

  71. Steels L (1998) The origins of ontologies and communication conventions in multi-agent systems. Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 1:169–194

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. Torroni P, Chesani F, Montali M, Mello P (2009) Social commitments in time: satisfied or compensated. The international workshop on declarative agent languages and technologies (DALT 2009)

  73. Verdiccio M, Colombetti M (2005) A commitment-based communicative act library. In: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems. ACM Press, Utrecht, pp 755–761

  74. Walton D, Krabbe E (1995) Commitment in dialogue: basic concepts of interpersonal reasoning. State University of New York Press, NY

    Google Scholar 

  75. Winikoff M, Liu W, Harland J (2004) Enhancing commitment machines, declarative agent languages and technologies II. Lect Notes Comput Sci 3476:198–220

    Article  Google Scholar 

  76. Wooldridge M (2000) Semantic issues in the verification of agent communication languages. J Auton Agents Multi-Agent Syst 3(1):9–31

    Article  Google Scholar 

  77. Wooldridge M (2002) An introduction to multi-agent systems. Wiley, Chichester

    Google Scholar 

  78. Yassine A, Shirehjini A, Shirmohammadi S, Thomas T (2011) Knowledge-empowered agent information system for privacy payoff in e-commerce. Knowl Inf Syst. doi:10.1007/s10115-011-0415-3

  79. Yolum P, Singh MP (2002) Flexible protocol specification and execution: applying event calculus planning using commitments. ACM, New York

    Google Scholar 

  80. Zhang R, Tran T (2011) An information gain-based approach for recommending useful product reviews. Knowl Inf Syst 26:419–434

    Article  Google Scholar 

  81. Zhuang Y, Fong S, Shi M (2008) Knowledge-empowered automated negotiation system for e-commerce. Knowl Inf Syst 17:167–191

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We thank Mariam Obeid and Zeinab Obeid for proof reading the paper and the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Foreign Languages, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

    Asma Moubaiddin

  2. Department of Computer Information Systems, King Abdullah II School for Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

    Nadim Obeid

Authors
  1. Asma Moubaiddin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nadim Obeid
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nadim Obeid.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Moubaiddin, A., Obeid, N. On formalizing social commitments in dialogue and argumentation models using temporal defeasible logic. Knowl Inf Syst 37, 417–452 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-012-0578-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-012-0578-6

Keywords