News

• The workshop program is available.

Overview

Agent interaction has been studied by researchers in the distributed AI and multi-agent communities for the past 15 years. These efforts have led to various proposals to standardize agent communication languages, from which FIPA ACL is the one standard most applications adhere to nowadays. Although FIPA ACL is widely used, the discussion about its message semantics has not yet abated. The main concern is that having the pre- and post-conditions of messages defined in terms of mental attributes makes their verification in open environments difficult. An alternative would be to have a purely syntactical approach, but this would not do justice to the intentional nature of agent communication. In addition to message semantics, the FIPA standard defines communication protocols indicating the sequencing of messages in conversations. The semantics of protocols is another promising area of research, since little work has been done to implement them in a standardized way, or to make their definition unambiguously clear.

In the past few years, research based on commitments has promised advances in these questions. However, there is still no consensus on the properties of these commitments, or their correlation to any other attitudes that agents may have.

In addition to semantics, new areas of research have opened in the past couple of years. This is the case of multi-party dialogues, which are concerned with conversations among multiple agents. Of particular interest is the case when some of these agents are humans. This opens the possibility that future communication standards may be directed to integrate pure-agent communication and agent-to-human conversation approaches.

The workshop builds on:

• AAMAS 2004 Workshop on Agent Communication
• AAMAS 2003 Workshop on Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies
• AAMAS 2002 Workshop on Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies

The workshop will solicit papers looking at both theory and practice of agent communication. Submission of papers linking technical or theoretical work with applications of this research are strongly encouraged.

The workshop will be co-located with the fourth international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems AAMAS 2005 in Utrecht.

Topics

We welcome papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Agent communication languages
• Semantics and pragmatics of ACL
• Conversational agents
• Dialogue games
• Ontologies and communication
• Human-agent communication
• Natural language processing application to communication
• Conversation policies
• Specification and implementation of agent conversation policies
• Validation of conversation policies
• FIPA's work on semantics and ACL
• Tools for communication
• Coordination and cooperation
• Negotiation
• Interoperability
• Multi-party conversations
• Commitments in communication
• Integration of protocols within agents
• Reuse in communication
• Practical aspects of the communication (medium, performance, fault-tolerance)
• Grounding ACL theory in computer science
• Speech Acts vs. method invocation

9:00 - 10:30 session 1: Protocols and Strategies

• On the study of negotiation strategies
  Leila Amgoud and Souhila Kaci
• Combining normal communication with ontology alignment
  Jurriaan van Diggelen, Robbert Jan Beun, Frank Dignum, Rogier M. van Eijk and John-Jules Meyer
• Temporal logics for representing agent communication protocols
  Ulle Endriss

• ACL: Specification, design and analysis all based on commitments
  Mathieu Bergeron and Brahim Chaib-draa
• Can I please drop it? Dialogues about belief contraction
  Henk-Jan Lebbink, Cilia Witteman and John-Jules Meyer

• On the semantics of conditional commitments
  Shakil M. Khan and Yves Lesperance
• An operational model for the FIPA-ACL semantics
  Vincent Louis and Thierry Martinez

• Practical issues in detecting broken social commitments
  Jason Heard and Robert C. Kremer
• Introducing preferences into commitment protocols
  Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh
• Using social commitments to control the agents' freedom of speech
  Guillaume Muller and Laurent Vercouter

• Reliable group communication and institutional action in a multi-agent trading scenario
  Stephen Cranefield
• A fault tolerant communication language for supporting web agent interaction
  Nicola Dragoni, Mauro Gaspari and Davide Guidi
• Experiments in selective overhearing of hierarchical organizations
  Gery Gutnik and Gal Kaminka

Submission Procedure

Contributors may submit either full papers (no longer than 5000 words, not including figures) or a one-page position statement that outlines their interests, background, and discussion of an aspect of the workshop theme. Preferred formats are the LNCS format of Springer or the IEEE format of the AAMAS 2005 conference.

All submissions should be sent either in PostScript format or in PDF format by email to Roberto Flores on flores@pcs.cnu.edu

At least one author of each accepted papers must register for the workshop.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:	March 14th 2005 (no extensions)
Notification of Acceptance:	April 18th 2005
Workshop:	July 25th or 26th 2005

Program Committee

• L. Amgoud (IRIT,France)
• J. Bentahar (Laval University, Canada)
• B. Chaib-draa (Laval University, Canada)
• P. Cohen (Oregon Health and Science University, USA)
• M. Colombetti (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
• M. Dastani (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
• F. Dignum (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
• A. El Fallah-Seghrouchni (University of Paris 6, France)
• F. Guerin (University of Aberdeen, UK)
• M. d'Inverno (Westminster University, UK)
• A. Jones (King's College, London, UK)
• N. Maudet (University of Paris 9, France)
• P. McBurney (University of Liverpool, UK)
• S. Parsons (Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA)
• J. Pitt (Imperial College, UK)
• S. Paurobally (University of Liverpool, UK)
• N. Roos (Maastricht University, The Netherlands)
• D. Traum (University of California Los Angeles, USA)
• G. Weiss (Technical University Munich, Germany)
• P. Yolum (Bogazici University, Turkey)

Publication

The proceedings have been published as: LNCS 3859

Papers of the 2002, 2003 and 2004 AAMAS workshops on Agent Communication have been published in the books:

• Communication in Multiagent Systems (volume 2650 of LNAI, Springer-Verlag)
• Advances in Agent Communication (volume 2922 of LNAI, Springer-Verlag)
• Developments in Agent Communication (volume 3396 of LNAI, Springer-Verlag)

Publication of a book on agent communication based on articles from this years workshop is planned.

Organising Committee

Co-Chairs: