RE: Web of speech-acts?

> From: Pat Hayes
> Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 8:45 PM
> 
> >   Or:  is it possible, reasonable and practical to apply 
> "speech act 
> >theory" to automata?
> 
> OK, let me grasp this nettle. In one sense it probably isn't, indeed: 
> the software agents aren't 'little people' to which all of human 
> social conventions apply, and they won't know Grice's maxims. But, 
> there is a strong tradition in agent theory to the effect that what 
> makes a software agent a genuine AGENT, as opposed to a mere scrap of 
> code, is precisely that it does act ON BEHALF of a human agent, and 
> in so acting as it were inherits some aspects of a social being, if 
> only in a kind of borrowed way. If I send out an agent which makes 
> assertions/promises/agreements then I am responsible for the 
> assertions/promises/agreements it makes, not it: but OK, it is still 
> doing the asserting/promising/agreeing on my behalf. So I want to 
> make sure that all this socially-defined stuff that it is doing is 
> clear, and the rules which surround such actions are clearly defined, 
> just as I would if I were doing this stuff myself. In fact, more so, 
> since I know that these little agents are pretty hopelessly lost when 
> asked to do anything they havn't been built to do. And in this sense, 
> I think that the SWeb vision DOES involve social actions performed by 
> software agents. I'd be much happier if these stupid little thingies 
> at least had the possibility of knowing what chunks of RDF they were 
> supposed to trust.
> 
> Pat
> 

http://www.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/publication_details.php?id=880
Is a masters thesis titled "Speech Acts and Agents" by Hans Madsen Pedersen. 
It is not based on Semantic Web technology, but very relevant. 

From the abstract:
"This thesis presents a formal model of speech act based conversations 
between autonomous agents. Our model is based on the basic ideas of 
speech act theory presented by John Searle.

Speech act theory describes the pragmatics (use) of communication between 
humans from a language/action perspective and considers language is a tool 
for performing actions. Our approach is focused on the social aspect of 
agents, where communication is considered as a public phenomenon shared 
among a group of interacting agents in a social context. Our model considers 
speech acts on two different social levels. At the first level, we formalize 
communication in terms of the obligations created by language actions in a 
given social context, e.g. a conversation. Obligations may be proposed, 
accepted, retracted, cancelled and fulfilled due to speech acts. We also 
formalize some concrete examples of speech act based conversations. At the 
social level two, our model is extended with the notions of social role power 
relations and agent authority relations. One of our aims is to formalize that 
the effect (semantics) of speech acts depends on the social context in which 
they are used. Our formalization is based on a subset of the Z specification 
language."

John Black

> <snip>
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Received on Friday, 18 June 2004 17:03:45 UTC