Multiple Agents and the Heuristic Ascription of Belief

A method for heuristically generating nested beliefs (what some agent believes that another agent-believes ... about a topic) is described. Such nested beliefs (points of view) are esential to many processes such as discourse processing and reasoning about other agents' reasoning processes. Particular interest is paid to the class of beliefs known as atypical beliefs and to intensional descriptions. The heuristic methods described are emboddied in a program called ViewGen that generates nested viewpoints from a set of beliefs held by the system. 1. Introduction We describe a computational model of beliefs for natural language understanding, planning and reasoning. In particular we are interested in generating complex belief structures known as points of view (what an agent believes about some topic). The model is based upon prior work reported in Wilks and Bien (1979; 1983). A Prolog program (ViewGen) for generating points of view is discussed, that ascribes belief using default reasoning.