Strategic and Tactic Reasoning for Communicating Agents

The purpose of this paper is to address the strategic and tactic issues in agent communication. Strategic reasoning enables agents to decide about the global communication plan in terms of the macroactions to perform in order to achieve the main conversational goal. Tactic reasoning, on the other hand, allows agents to locally select, at each moment, the most appropriate argument according to the adopted strategy. Previous efforts at defining and formalizing strategies for argumentative agents have often neglected the tactic level and the relation between strategic and tactic levels. In this paper, we propose a formal framework for strategic and tactic reasoning for rational communicating agents and the relation between these two kinds of reasoning. This framework is based on our social commitment and argument approach for agent communication.