Une sémantique unifiée des actes de langage. Aspects intentionnels et institutionnels des actes de langage

Multi-Agent Systems are often used for electronic business. Agents involved in such applications do not want to collaborate and strictly follow rules. In this paper we study interactions between such agents, and we propose a semantics of speech acts unifying various aspects that are generally handled separately by existing semantics: the intentional aspect, describing why an agent performs a given speech act; the public aspect, describing what the agent expresses with this act, independently of his private mental attitudes; and the institutional aspect, describing the direct effects of this act on the agents’ rights and duties. We illustrate this multi-dimensional semantics by formalising several speech acts from Searle’s classification. MOTS-CLÉS : institutions, langages de communication entre agents, engagements, logique BDI