Artimis Rational Dialogue Agent Technology: An Overview

Abstract

ARTIMIS is an effective intelligent agent technology designed and developed by France Telecom. It provides a generic framework to instantiate dialogue agents that are able to engage in rich interactions with human users (with no restriction on the communication media) as well as with other software agents. Several operational ARTIMIS-based applications have been developed, and commercial services have begun to be deployed. ARTIMIS relies on the principle that a system’s ability to carry on a natural dialogue with a human user must result from the system’s inherent intelligence. Consequently, an intelligent dialogue system needs to be first conceived and designed as an intelligent system. ARTIMIS provides a generic framework for the development of intelligent agents whose behaviour is wholly driven by explicit cognitive principles, such as rationality, communication and cooperation. ARTIMIS agents can also be components of multi-agent systems. In this case, to interact with other agents, they use the FIPA ACL standard (Agent Communication Language), whose formalism and semantics come from ARCOL, the ARTIMIS Communication Language.