Commitments are a powerful representation for modeling multiagent interactions. Previous approaches have considered the semantics of commitments and how to check compliance with them. However, these approaches do not capture some of the subtleties that arise in real-life applications, e.g., e-commerce, where contracts and institutions have implicit temporal references. The present paper develop...

In this paper, we introduce a new framework for recognizing textual entailment which depends on extraction of the set of publiclyheld beliefs – known as discourse commitments – that can be ascribed to the author of a text or a hypothesis. Once a set of commitments have been extracted from a t-h pair, the task of recognizing textual entailment is reduced to the identification of the commitments ...

This paper investigates hypotheses about the determinants of trade and investment liberalization with a particular focus on the market access commitments under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). We identify a positive impact of country size on the absolute coverage ratio, i.e. the ratio of the sum of weighted commitments to the number of possible commitments. Contrary to our the...

This paper puts forward a view on conditional commitments as causal rules, using action language K as the specification framework. The proposal builds upon an operational notion of social context, in such a way that conditional commitments are represented as rules in context. This approach enables the manipulation of conditional commitments in terms of the manipulation of the social interaction...

In this research, commitments – specifically collective commitments – are looked at as a way to model connections between agents in groups. Using the concepts and ideas from action languages, we propose to model these commitments as actions along with the other basic actions that autonomous agents are capable of performing. The languages developed will be tested against different examples from ...

In this paper, we present a dynamic semantics for dialogue in terms of commitments. We use this to provide a model theoretic treatment of ambiguity and its effects on the evolutions of commitments as a dialogue proceeds. Our first semantics ensures common commitments and has a simple logic for which we provide a complete axiomatization. On the other hand, our semantics poses difficulties for th...

Restoring forest landscapes is critical in the face of continued global forest loss and degradation. In this article, we explore some challenges underlying the delivery of global commitments to restore forest landscapes. We propose that three fundamental questions need to be resolved upfront for the effective implementation of Forest Landscape Restoration and related commitments: (1) What socia...

A ‘new Kyoto’, called for by the Australian government, may well be based on cap-and-trade, but with significant changes. Under the old Kyoto, broad participation and meaningful commitments were difficult to achieve – in part because of uncertainty about compliance costs and the dichotomy between countries with targets and those without. This policy brief examines options for making greenhouse ...

We propose a method for reactive mission planning in dynamic environments that also allows for appropriate commitments to future actions and goals. We consider appropriate commitments to be those based on predictable features of the situation and environment that are unlikely to change. By organizing other actions based on these commitments, we hope to create a planner that is able not only to ...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on services have proliferated since 2000. This working paper briefly presents the expansion of the dataset initially developed in Marchetti and Roy (2008). The data permits to assess the extent to which market access commitments undertaken by WTO Members in PTAs go beyond GATS commitments and offers made in the context of the Doha Development Agenda. The dat...