Acquiring knowledge from expert agents in a structured argumentation setting

Abstract

Information-seeking interactions in multi-agent systems are required for situations in which there exists an expert agent that has vast knowledge about some topic, and there are other agents (questioners or clients) that lack and need information regarding that topic. In this work, we propose a strategy for automatic knowledge acquisition in an information-seeking setting in which agents use a structured argumentation formalism for knowledge representation and reasoning. In our approach, the client conceives the other agent as an expert in a particular domain and is committed to believe in the expert's qualified opinion about a given query. The client's goal is to ask questions and acquire knowledge until it is able to conclude the same as the expert about the initial query. On the other hand, the expert's goal is to provide just the necessary information to help the client understand its opinion. Since the client could have previous knowledge in conflict with the information acquired from the expert agent, and given that its goal is to accept the expert's position, the client may need to adapt its previous knowledge. The operational semantics for the client-expert interaction will be defined in terms of a transition system. This semantics will be used to formally prove that, once the client-expert interaction finishes, the client will have the same assessment the expert has about the performed query.