Engineering Issues in Inter-Agent Dialogues

This paper presents a logical framework for modeling of complex dialogues between intelligent and autonomous agents. Our overall approach builds on the assumption that an agent is composed of a set of modules, each of them conveying the appropriate knowledge to carry out a certain dialogue type, such as deliberation, negotiation, persuasion, etc. Much attention has been paid in keeping our framework as operational as possible, in that the architecture of agents and their conversational protocol are thoroughly interrelated. Due to the proposed knowledge structure, set of application-independent rules (called dialogue policies) and the combination of backward and forward reasoning, the framework can generate automatic dialogues between agents.