Visualizing Agent Conversations: Using Enhanced Dooley Graphs for Agent Design and Analysis

Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Volume

Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Contents

In the MAS/DAI community, most current work on speech acts focuses on formalizing individual utterances. The next stage will exploit the theory’s power to explicate relationships within conversations, or groups of utterances. Computer scientists naturally seek to visualize these relationship in terms of graphs, focusing either on the identities of the individual agents involved or the states through which participating agents move. This paper introduces an alternative formalism, the Dooley graph. It reviews the kinds of relations that can exist among individual communicative actions (including both speech acts and non-speech acts), shows the strengths and weaknesses of participant and state graphs, explains the derivation of Dooley graphs, and suggests their value for designing agents and analyzing the behavior of communities of agents.