Unifying the intentional and institutional semantics of speech acts

Carole Adam (1) , Andreas Herzig (2, 3) , Dominique Longin (2, 3) , Vincent Louis (4)

1 RMIT University - Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University
2 IRIT-LILaC - Logique, Interaction, Langue et Calcul
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
4 Orange Labs [Caen]

Research about the semantics of agent communication languages traditionally sees the opposition between the mentalist and social approaches. In this paper we adopt a mixed approach since we propose a logical framework allowing us to express both the intentional and institutional dimensions of a communicative action. We use this framework to give a semantics for some speech acts representing each of Searle’s categories except expressives. This semantics relaxes the criticized constraints imposed in FIPA-ACL and also extends this standard with new speech acts and new institutional features to characterise them. It has been implemented in an extension of the Semantic Add-on for the JADE agent development platform, and used in an industrial application in the context of automated B2B exchanges.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Logique en informatique [cs.LO]

Carole Adam, Andreas Herzig, Dominique Longin, Vincent Louis. Unifying the intentional and institutional semantics of speech acts. 7th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2009), May 2009, Budapest, Hungary. pp.1-19. ⟨hal-03474450v2⟩