Article

Optimal utterances in dialogue protocols

Authors:

Peter McBurneyAuthors Info & Claims

AAMAS '03: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

Pages 608 - 615

https://doi.org/10.1145/860575.860673

Published: 14 July 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Dialogue protocols have been the subject of considerable attention with respect to their potential applications in multiagent system environments. Formalisations of such protocols define classes of dialogue locutions, concepts of a dialogue state, and rules under which a dialogue proceeds. One important consideration in implementing a protocol concerns the criteria an agent should apply in choosing which utterance will constitute its next contribution to a discussion in progress: ideally, an agent should select a locution that (by some measure) "optimises" the outcome. The precise interpretation of 'optimise' is, however, something that may vary greatly depending on the nature and intent of a dialogue area. If we consider 'persuasion' protocols, where one agent's intention is to convince others of the validity or invalidity of a specific proposition, then optimality might be regarded in the sense of "choice of locution that results in a 'minimal length' debate": thus the agent defending a hypothesis tries to select utterances that will convince other participants of the validity of this hypothesis after 'as few locutions as possible'. We present a formal setting for considering the problem of deciding if a particular utterance in the context of a persuasion dialogue is optimal in this sense. We show that, in general, this decision problem is both NP--hard and CO-NP--hard.

References

[1]

T. J. M. Bench-Capon. Specification and implementation of Toulmin dialogue game. In J. C. Hage et al., editor, Legal Knowledge Based Systems, pages 5--20. GNI, 1998.]]

[2]

T. J. M. Bench-Capon, P. E. Dunne, and P. H. Leng. A dialogue game for dialectical interaction with expert systems. In Proc. 12th Annual Conf. Expert Systems and their Applications, pages 105--113, 1992.]]

[3]

C. Cayrol, S. Doutre, and J. Mengin. Dialectical proof theories for the credulous preferred semantics of argumentation frameworks. In Sixth European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU-2001), pages 668--679. Lecture Notes in A.I., 2143, Springer, 2001.]]

Digital Library

[4]

V. Conitzer and T. Sandholm. Complexity results about Nash equilibria. Technical Report CMU-CS-02-135, School of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, May 2002.]]

[5]

M. Davis, G. Logemann, and D. Loveland. A machine program for theorem proving. Communications of the ACM, 5:394--397, 1962.]]

Digital Library

[6]

M. Davis and H. Putnam. A computing procedure for quantification theory. Journal of the ACM, 7:201--215, 1960.]]

Digital Library

[7]

F Dignum and M. Greaves (editors). Issues in Agent Communication. Springer-Verlag, 2000.]]

Digital Library

[8]

S. Doutre and J. Mengin. Preferred extensions of argumentation frameworks: Query answering and computation. In First Intern. Joint Conf. Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2001), pages 272--288. Lecture Notes in A.I., 2083, Springer, June 2001.]]

Digital Library

[9]

P. E. Dunne. Computability Theory - Concepts and Applications. Ellis-Horwood, 1991.]]

[10]

P. E. Dunne. Prevarication in dispute protocols. Technical Report ULCS-02-025, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Univ. of Liverpool, 2002.]]

[11]

P. E. Dunne and T. J. M. Bench-Capon. Two party immediate response disputes: Properties and efficiency. Technical Report ULCS-01-005, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Univ. of Liverpool, (to appear Artificial Intelligence)]]

[12]

J. Glazer and A. Rubinstein. Debates and decisions: on a rationale of argumentation rules. Games and Economic Behavior, 36(2):158--173, 2001.]]

[13]

T. F. Gordon. The Pleadings Game: An Artificial Intelligence Model of Procedural Justice. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1995.]]

Digital Library

[14]

S. Kraus. Strategic negotiation in multiagent environments. MIT Press, 2001.]]

Digital Library

[15]

P. Liberatore. On the complexity of choosing the branching literal in DPLL. Artificial Intelligence, 116:315--326, 2000.]]

Digital Library

[16]

A. R. Lodder. Dialaw: On legal justification and Dialogue Games. PhD thesis, Univ.of Maastricht, 1998.]]

[17]

P. McBurney, R. van Eijk, S. Parsons, and L. Amgoud. A dialogue-game protocol for agent purchase negotiations. J. Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, in press.]]

Digital Library

[18]

P. McBurney and S. Parsons. Representing epistemic uncertainty by means of dialectical argumentation. Annals of Mathematics and AI, 32(1--4):125--169, 2001.]]

Digital Library

[19]

P. McBurney and S. Parsons. Games that agents play: A formal framework for dialogues between autonomous agents. J. Logic, Language and Information, 11:315--334, 2002.]]

Digital Library

[20]

P. McBurney and S. Parsons. Chance Discovery using dialectical argumentation. In T. Terano et al., editors, New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, pages 414--424. Lecture Notes in A.I., 2253, Springer, 2001.]]

Digital Library

[21]

P. McBurney, S. Parsons, and M. W. Johnson. When are two protocols the same? In M. P. Huget, F. Dignum and J. L. Koning, editors, Agent Communications Languages and Conversation Policies, Proc. AAMAS-02 Workshop, Bologna, Italy, 2002.]]

[22]

P. McBurney, S. Parsons, and M. J. Wooldridge. Desiderata for agent argumentation protocols. In Proc. First Intern. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 402--409. ACM Press, 2002.]]

Digital Library

[23]

S. Parsons, C. A. Sierra, and N. R. Jennings. Agents that reason and negotiate by arguing. J. Logic and Computation, 8(3):261--292, 1998.]]

[24]

S. Parsons, M. J. Wooldridge, and L. Amgoud. An analysis of formal inter-agent dialgoues. In Proc. First Intern. Joint Conf. Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 394--401. ACM Press, 2002.]]

Digital Library

[25]

H. Prakken. Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1997.]]

[26]

C. Reed. Dialogue frames in agent communications. In Y. Demazeau, editor, Proc. 3rd Intern. Conf. Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-98), pages 246--253. IEEE Press, 1998.]]

Digital Library

[27]

G. Vreeswijk and H. Prakken. Credulous and sceptical argument games for preferred semantics. In Proc. JELIA'2000, The 7th European Workshop on Logic for Artificial Intelligence., pages 224--238, Berlin, 2000. Lecture Notes in A.I., 1919, Springer.]]

Digital Library

[28]

D. N. Walton and E. C. W. Krabbe. Committment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning. SUNY Press, Albany, 1995.]]

Cited By

Black EHunter A(2009)An inquiry dialogue systemAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-008-9074-519:2(173-209)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10458-008-9074-5
McBurney PParsons S(2009)Dialogue Games for Agent ArgumentationArgumentation in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_13(261-280)Online publication date: 10-May-2009
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_13
Bench-Capon TDunne P(2007)Argumentation in artificial intelligenceArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2007.05.001171:10-15(619-641)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.artint.2007.05.001
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Optimal utterances in dialogue protocols
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
      1. Cooperation and coordination
      2. Multi-agent systems
2. Theory of computation
  1. Computational complexity and cryptography
    1. Interactive proof systems
    2. Proof complexity
  2. Logic
    1. Proof theory

Recommendations

Prevarication in dispute protocols
ICAIL '03: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law

Models of persuasion, argument, and reasoning motivated by analogies from Law and legal process are now accepted formalisms supporting multi-agent discourse in applications such as contract negotiation and resolving disputed claims. A number of non-...
Interpretation of partial utterances in virtual human dialogue systems
HLT-DEMO '10: Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Demonstration Session

Dialogue systems typically follow a rigid pace of interaction where the system waits until the user has finished speaking before producing a response. Interpreting user utterances before they are completed allows a system to display more sophisticated ...
Non-sentential utterances in dialogue: a corpus-based study
SIGDIAL '02: Proceedings of the 3rd SIGdial workshop on Discourse and dialogue - Volume 2

Dialogue is full of intuitively complete utterances that are not sentential in their outward form, most prototypically the "short answers" used to respond to queries. As is well known, processing such non-sentential utterances (NSUs) is a difficult ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

AAMAS '03: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

July 2003

1200 pages

ISBN:1581136838

DOI:10.1145/860575

General Chairs:
Jeffrey S. Rosenschein
Israel
,
Michael Wooldridge
UK
,
Program Chairs:
Tuomas Sandholm
USA
,
Makoto Yokoo
Japan

Copyright © 2003 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 July 2003

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

AAMAS03

Sponsor:

AAMAS03: Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

July 14 - 18, 2003

Melbourne, Australia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

8
Total Citations
View Citations
348
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 22 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Black EHunter A(2009)An inquiry dialogue systemAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-008-9074-519:2(173-209)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10458-008-9074-5
McBurney PParsons S(2009)Dialogue Games for Agent ArgumentationArgumentation in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_13(261-280)Online publication date: 10-May-2009
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_13
Bench-Capon TDunne P(2007)Argumentation in artificial intelligenceArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2007.05.001171:10-15(619-641)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.artint.2007.05.001
Dunne P(2005)Extremal behaviour in multiagent contract negotiationJournal of Artificial Intelligence Research10.5555/1622503.162250523:1(41-78)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1622503.1622505
McBurney PParsons S(2004)A Denotational Semantics for Deliberation DialoguesProceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 110.5555/1018409.1018735(86-93)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1018409.1018735
McBurney PParsons S(2004)A denotational semantics for deliberation dialoguesProceedings of the First international conference on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/978-3-540-32261-0_11(162-175)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-540-32261-0_11
Dunne PMcBurney P(2004)Concepts of Optimal Utterance in Dialogue: Selection and ComplexityAdvances in Agent Communication10.1007/978-3-540-24608-4_18(310-328)Online publication date: 2004
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24608-4_18
Dunne PZeleznikow JSartor G(2003)Prevarication in dispute protocolsProceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law10.1145/1047788.1047791(12-21)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1047788.1047791

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents