ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Reasoning about Emotional Agents

John-Jules Meyer

In this paper we discuss the role of emotions in artificial agent design. From cognitive science we know that having emotions may help one to do reasoning and tasks for which rationality seems to be the only factor. For example, emotions moderate the execution and maintenance of the agent's agenda. Thus emotions make sense in describing the behaviour of certain intelligent agents, and may help structuring the design of the agent (by means of an architecture that caters for emotional aspects). Consequently - when specifying agent behaviour - it is useful to reason about emotions of an agent, or rather about the emotional states an agent may be in, together with its effects on the agent's actions. We do so by extending the KARO framework for reasoning about rational agents appropriately. In particular we formalize in this framework how emotions are related to the action monitoring capabilities of an agent. Here we are interested in at least two things: how do actions of agents change their emotional states and how do emotional states determine what action is taken and what effect is obtained from this in a given state.

Keywords: intelligent agents, modal logic, emotions

Citation: John-Jules Meyer: Reasoning about Emotional Agents. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.129-133.