The semantics of proactive communication acts among team-based agents

Abstract

Psychological studies about human teamwork have shown that members of an effective team can often anticipate needs of other teammates, and choose to assist teammates through appropriate ways. However the fulfillment of help behaviors among teammates is subject to team members' understanding of the underpinning communicative acts performed by individual agents. By extending the mental state analysis of performatives initiated by Cohen and Levesque (1990), we focus this paper on analyzing a missing class of performatives -proactive performatives, which are prevalently used by individual agents to exchange information among teammates.