1,721,026 research outputs found
GOAL Agents Instantiate Intention Logic
Full text linkIt is commonly believed there is a big gap between agent logics and
computational agent frameworks. In this paper, we show that this gap is not as big
as believed by showing that GOAL agents instantiate Intention Logic of Cohen
and Levesque. That is, we show that GOAL agent programs can be formally
related to Intention Logic.We do so by proving that the GOAL Verification Logic
can be embedded into Intention Logic. It follows that (a fragment of) Intention
Logic can be used to prove properties of GOAL agents. The work reported is an
important step towards the application of standard tools from modal logic for e.g.
model checking agent programs. Our results also prove useful for extending the
expressiveness of the GOAL agent language. This is illustrated by incorporating
temporally extended goals into GOAL agents
Effective acceptance conditions in real-time automated negotiation
Full text linkIn every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties must accept an offer to avoid a break off. As a break off is usually an undesirable outcome for both parties, it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When designing such conditions, one is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the current offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented before time runs out. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC), we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We perform extensive experiments to compare the performance of various acceptance conditions in combination with a broad range of bidding strategies and negotiation scenarios. Furthermore we propose new acceptance conditions and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions. We also provide insight into why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation scenario and the efficacy of acceptance condition
Decoupling negotiating agents to explore the space of negotiation strategies
Full text linkEvery year, automated negotiation agents are improving on various domains. However, given a set of automated negotiation agents, current methods allow to determine which strategy is best in terms of utility, but not so much the reason of success. In order to study the performance of the individual components of a negotiation strategy, we introduce an architecture that distinguishes three components which together constitute a negotiation strategy: the bidding strategy, the opponent model, and the acceptance strategy. Our contribution to the field of bilateral negotiation is twofold: first, we show that existing state-of-the-art agents are compatible with this architecture by re-implementing them in the new framework; secondly, as an application of our architecture, we systematically explore the space of possible strategies by recombining different strategy components, resulting in negotiation strategies that improve upon the current state-of-the-art in automated negotiation
Acceptance conditions in automated negotiation
Full text linkIn every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties has to accept an offer to avoid a break off. A break off is usually an undesirable outcome for both parties, therefore it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When designing such conditions one is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the current offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC), we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We focus on decoupled acceptance conditions, i.e. conditions that do not depend on the bidding strategy that is used. We performed extensive experiments to compare the performance of acceptance conditions in combination with a broad range of bidding strategies and negotiation domains. Furthermore we propose new acceptance conditions and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions that we study. In particular, it is shown that they outperform the standard acceptance condition of comparing the current offer with the offer the agent is ready to send out. We also provide insight in to why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation environment and the efficacy of acceptance condition
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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