The Design of Communicative Act Libraries: A Linguistic Perspective

The FIPA Agent Communication Language includes a library of communicative acts supporting generic types of social interaction, such as information exchange and action performing. However, when developing specific applications, it is desirable to support agent interaction by means of more expressive constructs. In this paper, a structured approach to the design of communicative act libraries is put forward, which takes into account both the criteria of reusability and expressiveness. A linguistic approach is taken to ensure the expressiveness requirement. The proposal is illustrated by the design of an advisory sub-catalogue of reusable communicative acts.