Dialogues for Negotiation: Agent Varieties and Dialogue Sequences

Logic-Based Agent Communication Protocols

“…Hence, our agent would be exhaustively conformant (note that the agent is certainly going to be weakly conformant, because the protocol is a consequence of its response space-in fact, the two are actually identical here). A similar idea is also present in [14], although not in the context of issues pertaining to protocol conformance. Fulfilling the above criterion is not an unreasonable requirement for a well-designed communication strategy S that is intended to be used for interactions governed by a given protocol P.…”

“…We are now going to consider the case of a specific class of agents based on abductive logic programming that have recently been used in the context of negotiation scenarios [14]. The communication strategy S of such an agent (which forms part of its knowledge base K) is represented as a set of if-then rules of the following form:…”

“…The latter property, which we shall simply refer to as exhaustiveness (of an agent) may be considered independently from a particular protocol. In [14], for instance, the authors define a notion of exhaustiveness with respect to a given communication language (as being able to utter a response for any incoming move belonging to that language). Even for our agents, whose communicative behaviour is determined by if-then rules of the form P (T )∧C ⇒ P (T+1), it is not generally possible to guarantee exhaustiveness (be it with respect to a given protocol, language, or in general).…”

“…In Section 4 we show that our logic-based representation greatly facilities checking whether a given agent is guaranteed to always behave in conformance to a particular protocol. We briefly recall the definition of a class of logic-based agents introduced in [14] and present sufficient criteria for such agents to be either weakly or exhaustively conformant to a protocol. Section 5 discusses potential generalisations of our protocol language and Section 6 discusses related work.…”

A Deduction System for Meaning Negotiation

“…Only a few works, however, have considered MN as a process; for instance, [11,5] deal with MN as an ontology alignment process, and [13,8,1,14,2] deal with negotiation issues from the point of view of game theory. In particular, a MN between two agents is similar to a Bargaining Game [10], i.e., the game in which two agents have to share, say, one dollar and do this by each making a proposal.…”