Commitment-Based Policies in Persuasion Dialogues with Defeasible Beliefs

Abstract

We advance a model to express the preconditions for engaging in dialogues in terms of the agents’ mental attitudes, in a defeasible logic context (beliefs are divided into strict and defeasible ones). Then, we give a protocol for the persuasion dialogue between two agents, which provides the means of identifying both false premises and logical fallacies. Communicative acts are organized in a hierarchy, and relations between speech acts and social commitments are expressed via policies involving operations on social commitments. Including commitments renders an observable behaviour of the communicating agents.