Modeling Communicative Behavior using Permissions and Obligations

We describe our preliminary work in modeling conversation specifications and policies as positive/negative permissions and obligations. Our model is generic as it is independent of the syntax and semantics of the communication language and can be used for different agent communication languages. We also discuss the relationship between conversation specifications and policies and show how both are used by an agent in order to decide what communicative act to perform next within a conversation. Our work is different from existing research in communication policies because it is not tightly coupled to any domain information like the mental states of agents or specific communicative acts.The main contributions of this work include (i) an extensible framework that can support varied domain knowledge and different agent communication languages, and (ii) the declarative representation of conversation specifications and policies in terms of permitted and obligated speech acts.