@conference {IIIA-2008-1618, title = {Formalising Interaction-Situated Semantic Alignment: the communication product}, booktitle = {10th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics}, year = {2008}, month = {02/01/2008}, address = {Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA}, abstract = {We provide the formal foundation of a novel approach to tackle semantic heterogeneity in multi-agent communication by looking at semantics related to interaction in order to avoid dependency on a priori semantic agreements. We do not assume existence of any ontologies, neither local to interacting agents nor external to them, and we rely only on interactions themselves to resolve terminological mismatches. In the approach taken in this paper we look at the semantics of messages that are exchanged during an interaction entirely from an interaction-specific point of view: messages are deemed semantically related if they trigger compatible interaction state transitions\textemdash{}where compatibility means that the interaction progresses in the same direction for each agent, albeit their partial view of the interaction (their interaction model) may be more simple than the interaction that is actually happening. Our underlying claim is that semantic alignment is often relative to the particular interaction in which agents are engaged in, and, that in such cases the interaction state should be taken into account and brought into the alignment mechanism.}, author = {Manuel Atencia Arcas and Marco Schorlemmer} }