Uttering Only What is Needed: Enthymemes in Multi-Agent Systems

One of the most important aspects of multi-agent systems is communication. Among the communication techniques in multi-agent systems, argumentation-based approaches have received special interest from the community, because they provide a rich form of communication by means of agents exchanging arguments. However, the additional information exchanged by agents could have an extra weight on the communication infrastructure, restricting the usage of argumentation techniques. In this work, we introduce an argumentation framework whereby agents are able to exchange fewer and shorter messages when engaging in dialogues by omitting information that is common knowledge (e.g., information about a shared multi-agent organisation). In particular, we use the idea of enthymemes, as well as referring to shared argumentation schemes (i.e., reasoning patterns from which such arguments were instantiated) and common organisational knowledge to guide argument reconstruction. We argue that the approach makes argumentation-based communication more efficient in the sense that agents can exchange fewer messages with shorter content, yet without any loss in the intended arguments.