An Interleaving Semantics of the Timed Concurrent Language for Argumentation to Model Debates and Dialogue Games
This work addresses the need for more realistic temporal modeling in agent-based systems, particularly for debates and dialogue games, though it appears incremental by extending existing argumentation frameworks with timing elements.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling dynamic interactions among intelligent agents by introducing a timed concurrent language that incorporates temporal intervals and argumentation frameworks, enabling the specification of actions within specific time frames and demonstrating its application to debates and dialogue games with a web-based implementation.
Time is a crucial factor in modelling dynamic behaviours of intelligent agents: activities have a determined temporal duration in a real-world environment, and previous actions influence agents' behaviour. In this paper, we propose a language for modelling concurrent interaction between agents that also allows the specification of temporal intervals in which particular actions occur. Such a language exploits a timed version of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks to realise a shared memory used by the agents to communicate and reason on the acceptability of their beliefs with respect to a given time interval. An interleaving model on a single processor is used for basic computation steps, with maximum parallelism for time elapsing. Following this approach, only one of the enabled agents is executed at each moment. To demonstrate the capabilities of language, we also show how it can be used to model interactions such as debates and dialogue games taking place between intelligent agents. Lastly, we present an implementation of the language that can be accessed via a web interface. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).