Agent Communication and Institutional Reality
Reference: Fornara, Viganò, Colombetti (2005). Agent Communication II, LNAI 3396, Springer. Source file: 978-3-540-32258-0_1.pdf. URL
Summary
Fornara, Viganò, and Colombetti propose regarding an Agent Communication Language as a set of conventions acting on a fragment of institutional reality, defined within an artificial institution. They reformulate commitment-based ACL semantics so that all commonly used communicative act types reduce to a single basic type, declarations, within a Basic Institution that regulates the lifecycle of social commitments.
Special institutions (e.g., English Auctions) extend the Basic Institution with ontological and normative elements. The approach is notable for making the semantics of speech acts publicly verifiable and independent of agents’ mental states, while retaining a uniform formal account of institutional actions and counts-as relations.
Key Ideas
- ACL messages are institutional actions governed by counts-as rules.
- Basic Institution manages creation/update/cancellation of social commitments.
- All speech act types reducible to declarations within the institution.
- Special institutions layer domain norms and ontologies on top.
- English Auction given as worked example.
Connections
Conceptual Contribution
- Claim: An ACL is best understood as a set of conventions operating on institutional reality; all communicative act types reduce to declarations within a Basic Institution that governs the lifecycle of social commitments.
- Mechanism: Defines artificial institutions with counts-as rules; models message effects as declarations creating/updating/cancelling commitments; layers domain norms in Special Institutions (English Auction worked example).
- Concepts introduced/used: Commitment-based Semantics, Institutional Reality, Counts-as Rules, Declarations, Performatives, Speech Act Theory, Public Semantics, Verifiable Semantics, Mentalistic Semantics, Ontologies, FIPA-ACL, Multi-Agent Systems
- Stance: formal-semantic
- Relates to: Offers the publicly-verifiable alternative to mental-state semantics of FIPA-ACL, which A Common Ontology Of ACLs then unifies via roles; grounded philosophically in Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic.
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