An Approach to Broaden the Semantic Coverage of ACL Speech Acts

Current speech-act based ACLs specify domain-independent information about communication and relegate domain-dependent information to an unspecified content language. This is reasonable, but the ACLs cover only a small fraction of the domain-independent information possible. As a key element of modern ACLs, the set of communicative acts needs to be as complete as possible to enable agents to communicate the widest range of information with agreed-upon semantics. This paper describes a new approach to broaden the semantic coverage of ACL speech acts. It provides agents with the ability to express more of the possible meanings in human languages and yields a more powerful ACL. Specifically, we first compare Austin’s and Searle’s classifications, and Ballmer and Brennenstuhl’s comprehensive classification of speech acts. The main meaning categories and their semantics are given next. Finally, a multifaceted evaluation of our approach is presented, which points out that the approach potentially can combine the benefits of the FIPA ACL with Ballmer and Brennenstuhl’s speech act classification, resulting in a more expressive ACL.