A Logical Framework for Grounding-based Dialogue Analysis

Abstract

A major critique against BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) approaches to communication is that they require strong hypotheses such as sincerity and cooperation on the mental states of the agents (cf. for example [Singh, M.P., Agent Communication Languages: Rethinking the Principles, Computer 31 (1998), pp. 40–47; Singh, M.P., A Social Semantics for Agent Communication Languages, in: F. Dignum and M. Greaves, editors, Issues in Agent Communication, number 1916 in LNAI (2000), pp. 31–45; Fornara, N. and M. Colombetti, Operational Specification of a Commitment-Based Agent Communication Language, in: C. Castelfranchi and L. W. Johnson, editors, Proc. First Int. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS-2002), ACM Press 2, 2002, pp. 535–542]). The aim of this paper is to remed this defect. Thus we study communication between heterogeneous agents via the notion of grounding, in the sense of being publicly expressed and established. We show that this notion is different from social commitment, from the standard mental attitudes, and from different versions of common belief. Our notion is founded on speech act theory, and it is directly related to the expression of the sincerity condition [Searle, J.R., “Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language,” Cambridge University Press, New York, 1969; Searle, J.R., “Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind,” Cambridge University Press, 1983; Vanderveken, D., “Principles of language use,” Meaning and Speech Acts 1, Cambridge University Press, 1990] when a speech act is performed. We use this notion to characterize speech acts in terms of preconditions and effects. As an example we show how persuasion dialogues à la Walton & Krabbe can be analyzed in our framework. In particular we show how speech act preconditions constrain the possible sequences of speech acts.