Enrico Oliva, Mirko Viroli, Andrea Omicini, Peter McBurney

Intelligent and autonomous software agents may engage in dialogue and argument with one another, and much recent research has considered protocols, architectures and frameworks for this. Just as with human dialogues, such agent dialogues may be facilitated by the presence of a mediator, able to summarise different positions, identify common assumptions and inconsistencies, and make appropriate interventions in the dialogue. Drawing on the theory of co-ordination artifacts in multi-agent systems, we propose a formal framework to explicitly represent the functions of a mediator artifact. We then describe an implementation of this framework using the TuCSoN coordination infrastructure for MAS, where the mediator artifact is realised by a tuple centre—a programmable tuple space.

5th International Workshop "Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems" (ArgMAS 2008), pages 24-39, 12 May 2008.
Iyad Rahwan, Pavlos Moraitis (eds.), AAMAS 2008, Estoril, Portugal

@inproceedings{artifacts-argmas08,
	Address = {AAMAS 2008, Estoril, Portugal},
	Author = {Oliva, Enrico and Viroli, Mirko and Omicini, Andrea and McBurney, Peter},
	Booktitle = {5th International Workshop ``Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems'' (ArgMAS 2008)},
	Editor = {Rahwan, Iyad and Moraitis, Pavlos},
	Month = {12~} # may,
	Pages = {24--39},
	Title = {Argumentation and Artifact for Dialogue Support},
	Year = 2008}