@MASTERSTHESIS\{IMM2002-0880,
    author       = "H. Madsen Pedersen",
    title        = "Speech acts and agents. A semantic analysis",
    year         = "2002",
    keywords     = "autonomous agents, speech acts, language semantics, social obligations, conversations, formal methods",
    school       = "Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, {DTU}",
    address      = "Richard Petersens Plads, Building 321, {DK-}2800 Kgs. Lyngby",
    type         = "",
    url          = "http://www2.compute.dtu.dk/pubdb/pubs/880-full.html",
    abstract     = "This thesis presents a formal model of speech act based conversations between autonomous agents. Our model is based on the basic ideas of speech act theory presented by John Searle.

Speech act theory describes the pragmatics (use) of communication between humans from a language/action perspective and considers language is a tool for performing actions. Our approach is focused on the social aspect of agents, where communication is considered as a public phenomenon shared among a group of interacting agents in a social context. Our model considers speech acts on two different social levels. At the first level, we formalize communication in terms of the obligations created by language actions in a given social context, e.g. a conversation. Obligations may be proposed, accepted, retracted, cancelled and fulfilled due to speech acts. We also formalize some concrete examples of speech act based conversations. At the social level two, our model is extended with the notions of social role power relations and agent authority relations. One of our aims is to formalize that the effect (semantics) of speech acts depends on the social context in which they are used. Our formalization is based on a subset of the Z specification language."
}