Dominique Longin

A logical formalization of the OCC theory of emotions

In this paper, we provide a logical formalization of the emotion triggering process and of its relationship with mental attitudes, as described in Ortony, Clore, and Collins’s theory. We argue that modal logics are particularly adapted to represent agents’ mental attitudes and to reason about them, and use a specific modal logic that we call Logic of Emotions in order to provide logical definitions of all but two of their 22 emotions. While these definitions may be subject to debate, we show that they allow to reason about emotions and to draw interesting conclusions from the theory.

The Logic of Acceptance

In the recent years, several formal approaches to the specification of normative multi-agent systems (MASs) and artificial institutions have been proposed. The aim of this article is to advance the state of the art in this area by proposing an approach in which a normative MAS is conceived to be autonomous, in the sense that it is able to create, maintain and eventually change its own institutions by itself, without the intervention of an external designer in this process. In our approach the existence and the dynamics of an institution (norms, rules, institutional facts, etc.) are determined by the (individual and collective) acceptances of its members, and its dynamics depends on the dynamics of these acceptances. In order to meet this objective, we propose the logic AL (Acceptance Logic) in which the acceptance of a proposition by the agents qua members of an institution is introduced. Such propositions are true w.r.t. an institutional context and correspond to facts that are instituted in an attitude-dependent way. The second part of the article is devoted to the logical characterization of some important notions in the theory of institutions. We provide a formalization of the concept of constitutive rule, expressed by a statement of the form ‘X counts as Y in the context of institution x’. Then, we formalize the concepts of obligation and permission (so called regulative rules). In our approach, constitutive rules and regulative rules of a certain institution are attitude-dependent facts which are grounded on the acceptances of the members of the institution.

Lotrec: The Generic Tableau Prover for Modal and Description Logics

The last years have seen a renewed interest in modal and description logics (MDLs). Better algorithms, coding, and technology have led to effective systems based on tableau and constraint systems [67] to DPLL-based implementations

LoTREC: logical tableaux research engineering companion

In this paper we describe a generic tableaux system for building models or counter-models and testing satisfiability of formulas in modal and description logics. This system is called LoTREC2.0. It is characterized by a high-level language for tableau rules and strategies. It aims at covering all Kripke-semantic based logics. It is implemented in Java and characterized by a user-friendly graphical interface. It can be used as a learning system for possible worlds semantics and tableaux based proof methods.

OCC’s emotions: a formalization in a BDI logic

Nowadays, more and more artificial agents integrate emotional abilities, for different purposes: expressivity, adaptability, believability... Designers mainly use Ortony et al.’s typology of emotions, that provides a formalization of twenty-two emotions based on psychological theories. But most of them restrain their agents to a few emotions among these twenty-two ones, and are more or less faithful to their definition. In this paper we propose to extend standard BDI (belief, desire, intention) logics to account for more emotions while trying to respect their definitions as exactly as possible.

A logical analysis of responsibility attribution: emotions, individuals and collectives

The aim of this article is to provide a logical analysis of the concept of responsibility attribution; that is, how agents ascribe responsibility about the consequences of actions, either to themselves or to other agents. The article is divided in two parts. The first part investigates the importance of the concept of responsibility attribution for emotion theory in general and, in particular, for the theory of attribution emotions such as guilt, pride, moral approval and moral disapproval. The second part explores the collective dimension of responsibility attribution and attribution emotions, namely the concepts of collective responsibility and collective guilt. The proposed analysis is based on an extension of the logic STIT (the logic of ‘Seeing To It That’) with three different types of knowledge and common knowledge modal operators depending on the time of choice: before one’s choice, after one’s choice but before knowing the choices of other agents, and after the choices of all agents have become public. Decidability of the satisfiability problem of the logic is studied in the article.

Endowing Emotional Agents with Coping Strategies: From Emotions to Emotional Behaviour

Emotion takes an increasingly important place in the design of intelligent virtual agents. Designers of emotional agents build on theories from cognitive psychology, that describe the cognitive functioning of emotions with two indivisible processes [1,2]: the appraisalprocess triggers emotions, in particular intense negative emotions to point out threatening stimuli, and the copingprocess modifies the behaviour to manage these stimuli. Nevertheless, among the existing emotional agents, a lot express emotions triggered by an appraisal process [3] but few have a coping process allowing their emotions to impact their behaviour [4,5,6]. In previous work [7] we provided a formalization of Ortony et al.s appraisal process [8] in a BDI logic, et al.sa logic of mental attitudes. The next step is to formalize the coping process in the same framework. Our aim here is to provide the theoretical basis of an agent architecture rather than an implementation. We only give here an overview of our framework (cf. [9,10] for more details).

On Modal Logics of Group Belief

We overview the existing philosophical accounts of group belief, including both aggregative (or reductionist) approaches reducing collective belief to individual beliefs and non-reductionist approaches ascribing beliefs to the group as a whole. We then provide a modal logic of group belief \(\mathcal{G}\mathcal{L}\) that follows a non-reductionist approach. We compare our group belief logic with the well-known logic of common belief (which is a logic of collective belief in an aggregative sense) and with the logic of group acceptance that has been recently proposed by some of us. Finally, in the spirit of dynamic epistemic logics we propose an extension of \(\mathcal{G}\mathcal{L}\) by public announcements.

Integration of Emotion in Evacuation Simulation

Computer simulation is a powerful tool for planning real evacuation scenarios during a crisis. In such context, emotion is a major factor that influences human decision making process and behavior. In this paper, we present our multi-agent simulation through the mathematical formalization of its main components: emotion and its dynamics, an heuristics for evasive actions of agents, the scenarios for tests and the results of theses tests. We show that on one hand, emotions increase the chaos of simulation which leads to an increase of collisions between agents, and on the other hand the evacuation time decreases because agents are more hurry to leave the place of the crisis.

Impact of group on the evacuation process: theory and simulation

Our main purpose is to build a simulation describing the persons movements in a public area during a crisis situation. Our running example is about the evacuation process of a supermarket during a fire. The main difficulty of such works comes from the fact that it is generally impossible to obtain precise descriptions of persons behaviors. After several works on individual emotions we are convinced that emotion is well adapted to explain such actions in a situation crisis. In the aim to test our hypothesis, we present here a first simulation (without any emotion management) that is a first step of our main purpose. This simulation aims to describe the well-known fact that, in crisis situation, humans tend toward to help each others. Thus, we test the impact of group constitution on survival rate and on average time. The simulation has been implemented with the platform GAMA.