A logic programming framework for the abductive inference of intentions in cooperative dialogues

In this paper we propose a general logic programming framework allowing the recognition of plans and intentions behind speech acts through abductive reasoning. These inferences enables each agent to have an active participation in dialogues, namely in cooperative informationseeking dialogues. In our framework the possible actions, events, states and world knowledge are represented by extended logic programs (LP with explicit negation) and the abductive inference process is modeled by a framework wich is based on the Well Founded Semantics augmented with explicit negation (WFSX) and contradiction removal semantics (CRSX) ([PAA92]). It will be shown how this framework supports abductive reasoning with Event Calculus ([Esh88]) and some classical examples in the domain of information-seeking dialogues will be shown ([Lit85, Pol86]). Finally, some open problems will be pointed out.