Ontological Overhearing

The collaboration between two intelligent agents can be greatly enhanced if a third agent, who has some understanding of the communication between the first two, intervenes giving appropriate information or acting helpfully without having been explicitly involved. The behavior of this third agent, quite common in human interaction, is called overhearing. We present an agent architecture modeling this behavior. In particular, we focus on overhearing based on ontological reasoning; that is, the overhearer semantically selects pieces of communication according to his own knowledge (ontologically organized) and goals. In our architecture, overhearing is performed by a team of agents playing two different roles: the first role (overhearer) classifies the overheard communication according to a formal ontology; the second role (suggester) makes appropriate suggestions at the appropriate time point. We present a formal language for the interaction between agents in the overhearing team. A prototype of the architecture, implemented using JACK Intelligent Agents, is briefly described and preliminary experimental results are discussed.