Locutions for Argumentation in Agent Interaction Protocols

Recent work in the design of agent interaction protocols has focused on applications involving dialectical argumentation — the giving and receiving of reasons for statements. Yet the most widely-known language for agent communications — the FIPA ACL — lacks locutions for such argument. Drawing on both speech act theory and the philosophy of communicative action, we first present a novel typology of speech acts for agent communications. We use this as the basis for proposing an interaction protocol, called Fatio, comprising five locutions we consider necessary for argumentation, and which may be added to the FIPA ACL. Both an axiomatic and an operational semantics for the Fatio Protocol are given.

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