Introduction

This chapter discusses in detail a typical example that requires KAMP to form a plan involving several physical and illocutionary acts, and then to integrate the illocutionary acts into a single utterance. This example does not reflect every aspect of utterance planning, but hopefully touches upon enough of them to enable an understanding of the way KAMP works, to illustrate the principles discussed in earlier chapters of this book, and to provide a demonstration of KAMP's power and some of its limitations. It is important to bear in mind that the implementation of KAMP was done to test the feasability of a particular approach to multiagent planning and language generation. Since it is not intended to be a “production” system, many details of efficiency involving both fundamental issues and engineering problems have been purposely disregarded in this discussion.

KAMP is based on a first-order logic natural-deduction system that is similar in many respects to the one proposed by Moore (1980). The current implementation does not take advantage of well-known techniques such as structure sharing and indexing that could be used to reduce some of the computational effort required. Nevertheless, the system is reliable, albeit inefficient, in making the necessary deductions to solve problems similar to the one described here.