This work presents a requirement analysis for collaborative dialogues among medical experts and an inquiry dialogue game based on this analysis for incorporating explainability into multiagent system design. The game allows experts with different knowledge bases to collaboratively make recommendations while generating rich traces of the reasoning process through combining explanation-based illocutionary forces in an inquiry dialogue. The dialogue game was implemented as a prototype web-application and evaluated against the specification through a formative user study. The user study confirms that the dialogue game meets the needs for collaboration among medical experts. It also provides insights on the real-life value of dialogue-based communication tools for the medical community.

We present DR-HAI -- a novel argumentation-based framework designed to extend model reconciliation approaches, commonly used in human-aware planning, for enhanced human-AI interaction. By adopting an argumentation-based dialogue paradigm, DR-HAI enables interactive reconciliation to address knowledge discrepancies between an explainer and an explainee. We formally describe the operational semantics of DR-HAI, provide theoretical guarantees, and empirically evaluate its efficacy. Our findings suggest that DR-HAI offers a promising direction for fostering effective human-AI interactions.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the virus analogy that gave rise to the use of the word "virus" from biology, to label a malicious program that attacks computer systems. The situation moves us to look into that, as another way to compare nature and artifact, and as an excuse to raise more abstract questions. We are moved also to stipulate that our mastery of both the biological and computational forms is shallow, and to invite other, better observations to follow. See Apvrille and Guillaume1 for greater depth and intriguing crossover speculation, Weis11 for yet more intriguing comparison, and Wenliang Du's website for detailed virus examples,3 which constitute dramatic reading for coders. A virus is generally not regarded as a living organism, but sometimes described as (similar to) software.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems need to include an explanation model to communicate the internal decisions, behaviours and actions to the interacting humans. Successful explanation involves both cognitive and social processes. In this paper we focus on the challenge of meaningful interaction between an explainer and an explainee and investigate the structural aspects of an interactive explanation to propose an interaction protocol. We follow a bottom-up approach to derive the model by analysing transcripts of different explanation dialogue types with 398 explanation dialogues. We use grounded theory to code and identify key components of an explanation dialogue. We formalize the model using the agent dialogue framework (ADF) as a new dialogue type and then evaluate it in a human-agent interaction study with 101 dialogues from 14 participants. Our results show that the proposed model can closely follow the explanation dialogues of human-agent conversations.

The Aristotelian trichotomy distinguishes three aspects of argumentation: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos. Even rich argumentation representations like the Argument Interchange Format (AIF) are only concerned with capturing the Logos aspect. Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT) adds the possibility to represent ethical requirements on the illocutionary force edges linking locutions to illocutions, thereby allowing to capture some aspects of ethos. With the recent extensions AIF+ and Social Argument Interchange Format (S-AIF), which embed dialogue and speakers into the AIF argumentation representation, the basis for representing all three aspects identified by Aristotle was formed. In the present work, we develop the Trichotomic Argument Interchange Format (T-AIF), building on the idea from S-AIF of adding the speakers to the argumentation graph. We capture Logos in the usual known from AIF+, Ethos in form of weighted edges between actors representing trust, and Pathos via weighted edges from actors to illocutions representing their level of commitment to the propositions. This extended structured argumentation representation opens up new possibilities of defining semantic properties on this rich graph in order to characterize and profile the reasoning patterns of the participating actors.

Remember the days when record-keeping trouble, such as an enormous and clearly erroneous bill for property taxes, was attributed to "computer error?" It can be seen easily in exaggerations like this, from a tech news digest: "Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI) has learned how to navigate like a human being." See the Nature article by the Google researchers2 for the accurate, cautious, description and assessment. The quote given cites an article in Fast Company, which states that "AI has spontaneously learned how to navigate to different places."4 But this is not the root of the problem.

In the contemporary autonomous systems the role of complex interactions such as (possibly relaxed) dialogues is increasing significantly. In this paper we provide a paraconsistent and paracomplete implementation of inquiry dialogue under realistic assumptions regarding availability and quality of information. Various strategies for dealing with unsure and inconsistent information are analyzed. The corresponding dialogue outcomes are further evaluated against the (paraconsistent and paracomplete) distributed beliefs of the group. A specific 4-valued logic underpins the presented framework. Thanks to the qualities of the implementation tool: a rule-based query language 4QL, our solution is both expressive and tractable.

Verification that agent communication protocols have desirable properties or do not have undesirable properties is an important issue in agent systems where agents intend to communicate using such protocols. In this paper we explore the use of model checkers to verify properties of agent communication protocols, with these properties expressed as formulae in temporal logic.  We illustrate our approach using a recently-proposed protocol for agent dialogues over commands, a protocol that permits the agents to present questions, challenges and arguments for or against compliance with a command.