Paraconsistent multi-party persuasion in talklog

Abstract

Some conflicts appearing in multi-agent settings may be resolved via communication. In this paper, besides conflicts of opinions, paradigmatically resolved by persuasion, we study resolution of conflicting justifications of opinions. To cope with agents’ ignorance and inconsistencies, often arising from perception and interactions, our formal framework TalkLOG employs a 4-valued logic with two additional logical values: unknown and inconsistent. Within TalkLOG we study such properties of persuasion as: termination, soundness and completeness. Another critical issue is complexity of agents’ communication, typically interleaved with reasoning. In TalkLOG tractability of both aspects is obtained thanks to the implementation tool: rule-based 4-valued language 4QL.