Cristina Baroglio

Verifying the conformance of web services to global interaction protocols: a first step

Global choreographies define the rules that peers should respect in their interaction, with the aim of guaranteeing interoperability. An abstract choreography can be seen as a protocol specification; it does not refer to specific peers and, especially in an open application domain, it might be necessary to retrieve a set of web services that fit in it. A crucial issue, that is raising attention, is verifying whether the business process of some peers, in particular the parts that encode the communicative behavior, will produce interactions which are conformant to the agreed protocol (legality issue). Such issue is tackled by the so called conformance test, which is a means for certifying the capability of interacting of the involved parts: two peers that are proved conformant to a same protocol will actually interoperate by producing a legal conversation. This work proposes an approach to the verification of a priori conformance of a business process to a protocol, which is based on the theory of formal languages and guarantees the interoperability of peers that are individually proved conformant.

Behavior-Oriented Commitment-based Protocols

Ever since the seminal work of Searle, two components of interaction protocols have been identified: constitutive rules, defining the meaning of actions and regulative rules, defining the flow of execution, i.e. the behavior the agent should show. The two parts together define the meaning of the interaction. Commitment-based protocols, however, usually do not account for the latter and, when they do it, they do not adopt a decoupled representation of the two parts. A clear distinction in the two representations would, however, bring many advantages, mainly residing in a greater openess of multi-agent systems, an easier re-use of protocols and of action definitions, and a finer specification of protocol properties. In this work we introduce the notion of behavior-oriented commitment-based protocols, which account both for the constitutive and the regulative specifications and that explicitly foresee a representation of the latter based on constraints among commitments. A language, named 2CL, for writing regulative specifications is also given.

From Tags to Emotions: Ontology-driven Sentiment Analysis in the Social Semantic Web

Affective computing is receiving increasing attention in many sectors, ranging from advertisement to politics. This work, set in a Social Semantic Web framework, presents ArsEmotica, an application software for associating the predominant emotions to artistic resources of a social tagging platform. Our aim is to extract a rich emotional semantics (i.e. not limited to a positive or a negative reception) of tagged resources through an ontology driven approach. This is done by exploiting and combining available computational and sentiment lexicons with an ontology of emotional categories. The information sources we rely upon are the tags by which users annotated resources, that are available through the ArsMeteo platform, and the ontology OntoEmotion, that was enriched by means of our tool with over four hundred Italian emotional words referring to the about eighty-five emotional concepts of the ontology. Tags directly referring to ontological concepts are identified, while potentially affective tags, can be annotated by using the ontology thanks to the spontaneous intervention of the user, in a pure Web 2.0 approach. Finally, the tagged artworks are related with the emerging predominant emotions. Matteo Baldoni Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita degli Studi di Torino e-mail: baldoni@di.unito.it Cristina Baroglio Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita degli Studi di Torino e-mail: baroglio@di.unito.it Viviana Patti Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita degli Studi di Torino e-mail: patti@di.unito.it Paolo Rena Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita degli Studi di Torino e-mail: paolo.rena@gmail.com

Personalization for the semantic web

Searching for the meaning of the word “personalization” on a popular search engine, one finds twenty-three different answers, including “the process of matching categorized content with different end users based on business rules ... upon page request to a Webserver”, “using continually adjusted user profiles to match content or services to individuals”, and also “real-time tailoring of displays, particularly Web pages, to a specific customers known preferences, such as previous purchases”. A little more generally, personalization is a process by which it is possible to give the user optimal support in accessing, retrieving, and storing information, where solutions are built so as to fit the preferences, the characteristics and the taste of the individual. This result can be achieved only by exploiting machine-interpretable semantic information, e.g. about the possible resources, about the user him/herself, about the context, about the goal of the interaction. Personalization is realized by an inferencing process applied to the semantic information, which can be carried out in many different ways depending on the specific task. The objective of this paper is to provide a coherent introduction into issues and methods for realizing personalization in the Semantic Web.

Reasoning about interaction protocols for customizing web service selection and composition

This work faces the problem of automatic selection and composition of web services, discussing the advantages that derive from the inclusion, in a web service declarative description, of the high-level communication protocol, that is used by the service for interacting with its partners, allowing a rational inspection of it. The approach we propose is set in the Semantic Web field of research and inherits from research in the field of multi-agent systems. Web services are viewed as software agents, communicating by predefined sharable interaction protocols. A logic programming framework based on modal logic is proposed, where the protocol-based interactions of web services are formalized and the use of reasoning about actions and change techniques (planning) for performing the tasks of selection and composition of web services in a way that is personalized w.r.t. the user request is enabled. We claim that applying reasoning techniques on a declarative specification of the service interactions allows to gain flexibility in fulfilling the user preference in the context of a web service matchmaking process.

Web-Based Adaptive Tutoring: An Approach Based on Logic Agents and Reasoning about Actions

In this paper we describe an approach to the construction of adaptive tutoring systems, based on techniques from the research area of Reasoning about Actions and Change.This approach leads to the implementation of aprototype system, having a multi-agent architecture,whose kernel is a set of rational agents,programmed in the logic programminglanguage DyLOG. In the prototype that weimplemented the reasoning capabilities of theagents are exploited both to dynamically buildstudy plans and to verify the correctness ofuser-given study plans with respect to thecompetence that the user wants to acquire.

A priori conformance verification for guaranteeing interoperability in open environments

An important issue, in open environments like the web, is guaranteeing the interoperability of a set of services. When the interaction scheme that the services should follow is given (e.g. as a choreography or as an interaction protocol), it becomes possible to verify, before the interaction takes place, if the interactive behavior of a service (e.g. a BPEL process specification) respects it. This verification is known as “conformance test”. Recently some attempts have been done for defining conformance tests w.r.t. a protocol but these approaches fail in capturing the very nature of interoperability, turning out to be too restrictive. In this work we give a representation of protocol, based on message exchange and on finite state automata, and we focus on those properties that are essential to the verification of the interoperability of a set of services. In particular, we define a conformance test that can guarantee, a priori, the interoperability of a set of services by verifying properties of the single service against the protocol. This is particularly relevant in open environments, where services are identified and composed on demand and dynamically, and the system as a whole cannot be analyzed.

Constitutive and regulative specifications of commitment protocols: A decoupled approach

Interaction protocols play a fundamental role in multiagent systems. In this work, after analyzing the trends that are emerging not only from research on multiagent interaction protocols but also from neighboring fields, like research on workflows and business processes, we propose a novel definition of commitment-based interaction protocols, that is characterized by the decoupling of the constitutive and the regulative specifications and that explicitly foresees a representation of the latter based on constraints among commitments. A clear distinction between the two representations has many advantages, mainly residing in a greater openness of multiagent systems, and an easier reuse of protocols and of action definitions. A language, named 2CL, for writing regulative specifications is also given together with a designer-oriented graphical notation.

Verifying protocol conformance for logic-based communicating agents

Communication plays a fundamental role in multi-agents systems. One of the main issues in the design of agent interaction protocols is the verification that a given protocol implementation is “conformant” w.r.t. the abstract specification of it. In this work we tackle those aspects of the conformance verification issue, that regard the dependence/independence of conformance from the agent private state in the case of logic, individual agents, set in a multi-agent framework. We do this by working on a specific agent programming language, DyLOG, and by focussing on interaction protocol specifications described by AUML sequence diagrams. By showing how AUML sequence diagrams can be translated into regular grammars and, then, by interpreting the problem of conformance as a problem of language inclusion, we describe a method for automatically verifying a form of “structural” conformance; such a process is shown to be decidable and an upper bound of its complexity is given. We also give a set of properties that describes the influence of the agent private information on the conformance of its communication policies to protocol specifications.

AI*IA 2013: Advances in Artificial Intelligence

ion in Markov Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Lorenza Saitta Improving the Structuring Capabilities of Statistics–Based Local Learners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Slobodan Vukanović, Robert Haschke, and Helge Ritter Kernel-Based Discriminative Re-ranking for Spoken Command Understanding in HRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Roberto Basili, Emanuele Bastianelli, Giuseppe Castellucci, Daniele Nardi, and Vittorio Perera Natural Language Processing A Natural Language Account for Argumentation Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Elena Cabrio, Sara Tonelli, and Serena Villata Deep Natural Language Processing for Italian Sign Language Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Alessandro Mazzei, Leonardo Lesmo, Cristina Battaglino, Mara Vendrame, and Monica Bucciarelli A Virtual Player for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” based on Question Answering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Piero Molino, Pierpaolo Basile, Ciro Santoro, Pasquale Lops, Marco de Gemmis, and Giovanni Semeraro The Construction of the Relative Distance Fuzzy Values Based on the Questionnaire Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Jedrzej Osiński Process Fragment Recognition in Clinical Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Camilo Thorne, Elena Cardillo, Claudio Eccher, Marco Montali, and Diego Calvanese