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We discuss our research on an agent platform, based on the BDI paradigm, which we plan to use in multi-user, multi-agent virtual environments where interaction between users and agents can take place in multi-modal ways. Presently we have environments where more than one agent is available and where there is a need for uniformity in agent design and agent interaction [Nijholt et al., 2000]. This requires a general and uniform approach to developing agent-oriented virtual environments that allow multi-modal interaction.

This approach is part of our so-called AVEIRO (Agents in Virtual Environments) project. This project aims at developing a framework for agent behavior and agent communication in visualized (virtual, 3D) worlds, where there is multi-modal communication between agents and where agents may have different capabilities, including the capability to represent humans, (part of) their properties and (part of) their behavior, including the possibility to capture this behavior using head-trackers, eye-trackers, data gloves and haptic devices and motion capturing technology. However, in order to do so we need to develop frameworks for agents and agent communication. We already introduced a framework that allows different agents to send messages to each other. It has been used in the implementation of a navigation agent interacting with a visitor and some software agents [Luin et al., 2001] and in the design and implementation of a personal assistant [Zwiers et al., 2000] that can make suggestions to a visitor of our virtual theatre environment.

In the talk we focus on a formal model for conversational planning agents, for which we discuss the specification of beliefs, desires and conditional plans. After introducing the formal model we discuss the relation between natural language and the communication as it is defined for these agents. We also show how referential problems are treated in the process of interpreting the informational content in a dialogue situation.

References [Nijholt and Hondorp, 2000] A. Nijholt & H. Hondorp. Towards communicating agents and avatars in virtual worlds. In: Proceedings EUROGRAPHICS 2000, A. de Sousa & J.C. Torres (eds.), August 2000, Interlaken, 91-95.

[van Luin et al., 2001] J. van Luin, R. op den Akker and A. Nijholt. A dialogue agent for navigation support in virtual reality. Proceedings ACM SIGCHI Conference CHI 2001: Anyone. Anywhere. March/April 2001, Extended Abstracts, Association for Computing Machinery, J. Jacko and A. Sears (eds.), 117-118.

[Zwiers et al., 2000] J. Zwiers, B. van Dijk, A. Nijholt, and R. op den Akker. Design issues for navigation and assistance agents in virtual environments. In A. Nijholt, D. Heylen, and K. Jokinen, editors, Twente Workshop on Language Technology 17, 119-132, 2000.

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