DIAGAL: An agent communication language based on dialogue games and sustained by social commitments

Abstract

In recent years, social commitment based approaches have been proposed to solve problems issuing from previous mentalistic based semantics for agent communication languages. This paper follows the same line of thought since it presents the latest version of our dialogue game based agent communication language - DIAlogue-Game based Agent Language (DIAGAL) - which allows agents to manipulate the public layer of social commitments through dialogue, by creating, canceling and updating their social commitments. To make apparent such commitments, we consider here Agent Communication Language (ACL) from the dialectic point of view, where agents "play a game" based on commitments. Such games based on commitments are incorporated in the DIAGAL language, which has been developed having in mind the following questions: (a) What kind of structure does the game have? How are rules specified within the game? (b) What kind of games compositions are allowed? (c) How do participants in conversations reach agreement on the current game? How are games opened or closed? Using such games we show how we can study the commitments dynamic to model agent dialogue and we present metrics that can be used to evaluate the quality of a dialogue between agents. Next, we use an example (summer festival organization) to show how DIAGAL can be used in analyzing and modeling automated conversations in offices. Finally, we present the results and analysis of the summer festival simulations that we realized through our dialogue game simulator (DGS). © Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006.