Norms of Conversation in a Framework for Agent Communication Languages

In open and heterogeneous environments offered by the Internet, where agents are designed by different vendors, the development of standards for agent communication needs to keep abreast of new dynamic interaction modalities. The objective of this paper is to contribute to FIPA's standardization effort by proposing a pragmatic approach to the design of agent communication languages (ACLs) in which the meaning of messages is the combination of its semantics and pragmatics. First, we present a reformulation of FIPA's communicative acts (ACL semantics) using a grounded specification language which overcomes some of the usual problems attributed to FIPA's ACL semantics. Then the ACL pragmatics aims to account for the contextual factors that enriches the semantics, such agents' roles, turn-taking, and the satisfiability of messages' perlocutionary effects. We claim that the ACL pragmatics is best specified by means of norms related to agents' obligations, permissions and rights.