“Agent A, Can You Pass the Salt?” The Role of Pragmatics in Agent Communication

Developers of current agent communication languages (ACLs) have exploited the parallels between agent communication and human communication in developing the syntax and semantics of their languages. In this paper we extend the comparison of agent communication language to natural language by proposing an ACL pragmatics. Just as in natural language, the pragmatics of an ACL is the relationship between the language and its communicative context. Agent communication via ACLs is different from human communication with natural language, and so not all aspects of natural language pragmatics apply. But there are specific areas where it makes sense to talk about ACL pragmatics when we consider an ACL in its communicative context. We discuss two such areas: 1) the cooperative use of speech acts in ∗The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the DARPA CoABS Program (Contract F30602-98-C-0170) and the NASA Ames Research Center (Contract NCA2-2005) while preparing this paper.