Cooperative dialogues with the support of autonomous agents

An architectural specification of independent communicating agents is described. Such agents are designed for use in an environment which is most suitably represented as a graph or network and an example of one such environment is given based on the structured document graph paradigm. The specifications extend agent architectures in a natural way so that the complexities found in distributed systems may be addressed. Such an approach has a number of advantages. It provides a general representation paradigm that can be used as a basis in a wide range of intelligent distributed systems, and is easily customized to cope with problems requiring graphs with differing structures and with different node and edge properties and attributes. A suitable platform to build agents and environments and an example of cooperative communication using dialogue analysis are presented.<>