Table 2: Speech acts and the potential replies.
Speech acts Resisting Surrendering
sr
1
claim
(P)
claim
(P
′
), with
r
s.t
concede
({L}),
L =
head
(
r
) ∈ P and with L ∈ P
body
(
r
) = P
′
oppose
({L
′
}), with
unknown
(P)
L
′
I L and L ∈ P
sr
2
oppose
({L})
claim
(P
′
), with
r
s.t.
unknown
(P)
L =
head
(
r
) and
body
(
r
) = P
′
deny
({L
′
}),
with L
′
I L
sr
3
concede
(P)
/
0
/
0
sr
4
unknown
(P)
/
0
/
0
claim (
claim
({L
′
})). At the end of the game,
Pro
may contains the assumptions of an argument deduc-
ing
motive
.
6 CONCLUSIONS
We have proposed a dialectical argumentation frame-
work allowing an agent to argue with itself about its
motivations. The framework relies upon the admis-
sibility semantics and uses an assumption-based ar-
gumentation approach to support reasoning about the
knowledge, goals, and decisions held in the agent’s
mental facets. These modules interact via a dialogue-
game which is formally defined and exemplified via a
concrete scenario. The contribution of the work is a
modular model that allows the facets and the person-
ality of an agent to be specified declaratively, man-
ages potential conflicts and replaces components at
runtime, thus avoiding to restart the agent’s reason-
ing process whenever a component joins or leaves the
game.
Some of the concepts utilized here have been intro-
duced in the AAA model (Witkowski and Stathis,
2004). However, here we provide a formal defini-
tion of the argumentation game that the original AAA
model abstracted away from. We have also reinter-
preted the original model by using the Vowels ap-
proach, which has an agent-oriented software engi-
neering foundation.
Our work is also related to the KGP (Kakas et al.,
2004b) model of agency and in particular the mod-
elling of the personality of the agent (Kakas et al.,
2004a) through preferences. One important differ-
ence with (Kakas et al., 2004a) comes from our de-
composition which distinguishes explicitly the differ-
ent aspects, possibly conflicting, that the agent must
arbitrate. These aspects are embodied by faculties that
are more amenable to be plug-and-play components at
run-time using a multi-threaded implementation.
Future work includes investigating the properties
of different dialogue-games for different semantics
and properties. We also plan to extend the current
prototype using CaSAPI
1
to allow an internal dialec-
tic that is multi-threaded and relies on facets that are
interpreted by different proof systems implementing
different kinds of reasoning such as epistemic reason-
ing, practical reasoning and normative reasoning.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the Sixth Framework IST
035200 ARGUGRID project.
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1
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/∼dg00/casapi.html
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