Toward a Semantics for a Speech Act Based Agent Communications Language

Implementations of systems based on distributed agent architectures require an agent communications language. The language must have a clearly defined semantics; without such a semantics, no agent can be sure what another agent's commitment to perform a task means. In this context, agent to agent communications can be viewed as a task oriented dialogue for building, maintaining and disbanding teams. A speech act model based on joint intentions can provide the means for agents to build maintain and disband teams. It can also not only describe the outward appearance of a task oriented dialogue, but can also provide motivation for the step by step structure of the dialogue. In this paper we begin to develop a semantics for an agent communications language based on the interactive abilities of agents and use these semantics to analyze the Winograd & Flores basic conversation for action. 1 Introduction In this paper we begin to develop a semantics for an agent communications language based..