The cognitive coherence approach for agent communication pragmatics

Different approaches have investigated the syntax and semantic of agent communication. However, all these approaches (including : agent communication languages, conversation policies and dialogue games) have not indicated how agents should dynamically use communications. In fact, most of these approaches have mainly focused on "structure" of dialogues even though developers are more interested in agents' capabilities of having "useful" conversations in respect to their goals rather than in their abilities to structure dialogues. This leads us to propose a theory of use of conversations between agents. This pragmatic theory extends and adapts the cognitive dissonance theory (a major theory of social psychology) to multi-agent systems. In this paper, we show how this theory allows us to provide generic conceptual tools for the automation of both agent communicational behavior and attitude change processes. The cognitive coherence that we propose is formulated in terms of constraints and elements of cognition and allows us to define cognitive incoherences and dialogue utility measures. We show how these measures could be used to solve common problems and answer some critical questions concerning agent communication frameworks use. Finally, the theory is illustrated with an example of dialogue games automatic use.