Abstract
We describe a formal approach to protocol design for dialogues between autonomous agents in a digital ecosystem that involve the exchange of arguments between the participants. We introduce a vector language-based representation of argumentation protocols, which captures the interplay between different agentspsila moves in a dialogue in a way that (a) determines the legal moves that are available to each participant, in each step, and (b) records the dialogue history. We use UML protocol state machines (PSMs) to model a negotiation dialogue protocol at both the individual participant level (autonomous agent viewpoint) and the dialogue level (overall interaction viewpoint). The underlying vector semantics is used to verify that a given dialogue was played out in compliance with the corresponding protocol.