The Semantic Interpretation of Trust in Multiagent Interactions

In a multiagent system, a truster keeps estimating and revising its trust for a trustee based on its interactions with trustee. Understanding these interactions and estimating trust from them is an interesting and challenging topic and therefore, several works have been pursued in this direction. Scissors et al. (Scissors et al. 2009) explore the linguistic similarity in chat messages to estimate trust between message senders and receivers. Adalı et al. (Adalı, Sisenda, and Magdon-Ismail 2012) calculate the relationship strength between two users in Twitter based on their different social and behavioral aspects. (DuBois, Golbeck, and Srinivasan 2011) provide an algorithm to compute trust and distrust in a social network. The above approaches are promising but they are limited to numerical heuristics. Such approaches are justifiably criticized for missing the essential intuitive considerations of trust, e.g., regarding the autonomy of the participants and the vulnerability of the truster to decisions by the trustee. The richer approaches, however, have not lent themselves well to computational techniques that could be applied in practice (Castelfranchi and Falcone 2010). Therefore, we seek to bridge the above gap between theory and practice. Specifically, we propose a computational model of trust founded on commitments that supports agents determining their trust for others based on their interactions.