Towards an Enthymeme-Based Communication Framework in Multi-Agent Systems

Communication is one of the most important aspects of multi-agent systems. Among the different communication techniques applied to multi-agent systems, argumentation-based approaches have received special interest from the community, because allowing agents to exchange arguments provides a rich form of communication. In contrast to the benefits that argumentation-based techniques provide to multi-agent communication, extra weight on the communication infrastructure results from the additional information exchanged by agents, which could restrict the practical use of such techniques. In this work, we propose an argumentation framework whereby agents are able to exchange shorter messages when engaging in dialogues by omitting information that is common knowledge (e.g., information about a shared multi-agent organisation). In particular, we focus on using enthymemes, shared argumentation schemes (i.e., reasoning patterns from which arguments are instantiated), and common organisational knowledge to build an enthymeme-based communication framework. We show that our approach addresses some of Grice's maxims, in particular that agents can be brief in communication, without any loss in the content of the intended arguments.