Multi-Party Persuasion: a Paraconsistent Approach
Barbara Dunin‐Kȩplicz, Alina Powała · Fundamenta Informaticae · 2018
Some conflicts appearing in multi-agent settings may be resolved via communication. In this paper, besides conflicts of opinions, paradigmatically resolved by a persuasion dialogue, we study semantically deeper conflicts reaching to motivations of opinions. This investigation led us to discerning d eep persuasion dialogues aiming at the resolution of conflicting motivations of opinions. In our overall research program we focus on realistic modeling of agency. This includes a proper representation of agents’ ignorance and inconsistencies, appearing in their informational stance. Therefore, our formal framework TalkLOG, designed to provide and embed different forms of dialogues, employs a 4-valued logic with two additional logical values, unknown and inconsistent. Within TalkLOG soundness and completeness of persuasion was proved by comparing the outcomes of the persuasion dialogues performed by n-agents with the outcomes obtained by merging knowledge of these n agents. In this context the key point was a proper construction of this merge operator. Another critical issue is complexity of agents’ communication, which is typically interleaved with reasoning in the context of multi-agent or autonomous systems. In TalkLOG tractability of both aspects is obtained thanks to the implementation tool: rule-based 4-valued query language 4QL.