In the interaction between agents we can have an explicative discourse, when communicating preferences or intentions, and a normative discourse, when considering normative knowledge. For justifying their actions our agents are endowed with a Justification and Explanation Logic (JEL), capable to cover both the justification for their commitments and explanations why they had to act in that way, ...

Since the introduction of a commitments procedure in EU antitrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Bebchuk, 1984; Shavell, 1988) to identify the optimal procedure to resolve cases in a context of uncertainty related to the law (L-un...

SUMMARY Increasingly, food companies play an important role in stemming the rising burden of nutrition-related chronic diseases. Concrete actions taken by these companies include global public commitments to address food reformulation, consumer information, responsible marketing, promotion of healthy lifestyles, and public-private partnerships. These actions are reviewed together with eleven sp...

Commitments are a powerful representation for modeling multiagent interactions. Previous approaches have considered the semantics of commitments and how to check compliance with them. However, these approaches do not capture some of the subtleties that arise in real-life applications, e.g., e-commerce, where contracts and institutions have implicit temporal references. The present paper develop...

In this paper, we introduce a new framework for recognizing textual entailment which depends on extraction of the set of publiclyheld beliefs – known as discourse commitments – that can be ascribed to the author of a text or a hypothesis. Once a set of commitments have been extracted from a t-h pair, the task of recognizing textual entailment is reduced to the identification of the commitments ...

This paper investigates hypotheses about the determinants of trade and investment liberalization with a particular focus on the market access commitments under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). We identify a positive impact of country size on the absolute coverage ratio, i.e. the ratio of the sum of weighted commitments to the number of possible commitments. Contrary to our the...

This paper puts forward a view on conditional commitments as causal rules, using action language K as the specification framework. The proposal builds upon an operational notion of social context, in such a way that conditional commitments are represented as rules in context. This approach enables the manipulation of conditional commitments in terms of the manipulation of the social interaction...

In this research, commitments – specifically collective commitments – are looked at as a way to model connections between agents in groups. Using the concepts and ideas from action languages, we propose to model these commitments as actions along with the other basic actions that autonomous agents are capable of performing. The languages developed will be tested against different examples from ...

In this paper, we present a dynamic semantics for dialogue in terms of commitments. We use this to provide a model theoretic treatment of ambiguity and its effects on the evolutions of commitments as a dialogue proceeds. Our first semantics ensures common commitments and has a simple logic for which we provide a complete axiomatization. On the other hand, our semantics poses difficulties for th...

Restoring forest landscapes is critical in the face of continued global forest loss and degradation. In this article, we explore some challenges underlying the delivery of global commitments to restore forest landscapes. We propose that three fundamental questions need to be resolved upfront for the effective implementation of Forest Landscape Restoration and related commitments: (1) What socia...