An empirical semantics approach to reasoning about communication

In the process of designing multiagent systems, it is often the case that some kind of specification of communication rules (in the form of protocols, ACL semantics, etc.) is available. and The question naturally arises how appropriate agents can be designed to can operate on such a specification. Moreover, if these multiagent systems are viewed as open systems, the problem is complicated even further by the fact that adherence to such a supposedly agreed specification cannot be ensured on the side of other agents. This paper presents an architecture for dealing with a very generic type of prespecified communication patterns (which contain surface structure and logical constraint specifications) based on an empirical semantics model of communication. This model allows for flexible adaptation to evolving communication semantics by combining existing expectations about the use of communication with empirical observation. This architecture is based on the InFFrA social reasoning framework and the concept of interaction frames. We show how interaction frames that represent classes of interaction situations can be used to conduct decision-theoretic reasoning about communication when interpreted using the empirical semantics approach. We introduce the abstract architecture, a formal model for its probabilistic semantics and present results of an experimental validation of our approach in a complex domain that illustrate its effectiveness.