Summary: Ontological Overhearing ?
Marco Aiello y , Paolo Busetta  , Antonia Don‘a  , and Luciano Serafini 
y ILLC and ISIS, University of Amsterdam
Plantage Muidergracht 24, 1018 TV Amsterdam, the Netherlands
y DISA ­ University of Trento, Via Inama 5, 38100 Trento, Italy
 ITC­IRST, Via Sommarive 18, 38050 Povo, Trento, Italy
Abstract. The collaboration between two intelligent agents can be greatly en­
hanced if a third agent, who has some understanding of the communication be­
tween the first two, intervenes giving appropriate information or acting helpfully
without having been explicitly involved. The behavior of this third agent, quite
common in human interaction, is called overhearing. We present an agent archi­
tecture modeling this behavior. In particular, we focus on overhearing based on
ontological reasoning; that is, the overhearer semantically selects pieces of com­
munication according to his own knowledge (ontologically organized) and goals.
In our architecture, overhearing is performed by a team of agents playing two
different roles: the first role (overhearer) classifies the overheard communication
according to a formal ontology; the second role (suggester) makes appropriate
suggestions at the appropriate time point. We present a formal language for the in­
teraction between agents in the overhearing team. A prototype of the architecture,
implemented using JACK Intelligent Agents, is briefly described and preliminary

Source: Aiello, Marco - Institute for Mathematics and Computing Science, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences