Modelling Reasoning with Precedents in a Formal Dialogue Game

Author(s):  
Henry Prakken ◽  
Giovanni Sartor
Author(s):  
Erik C.W. Krabbe

Dialogical logic characterizes logical constants (such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘for all’) by their use in a critical dialogue between two parties: a proponent who has asserted a thesis and an opponent who challenges it. For each logical constant, a rule specifies how to challenge a statement that displays the corresponding logical form, and how to respond to such a challenge. These rules are incorporated into systems of regimented dialogue that are games in the game-theoretical sense. Dialogical concepts of logical consequence can then be based upon the concept of a winning strategy in a (formal) dialogue game: B is a logical consequence of A if and only if there is a winning strategy for the proponent of B against any opponent who is willing to concede A. But it should be stressed that there are several plausible (and non-equivalent) ways to draw up the rules.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Niklas Rach ◽  
Klaus Weber ◽  
Yuchi Yang ◽  
Stefan Ultes ◽  
Elisabeth André ◽  
...  

Abstract Persuasive argumentation depends on multiple aspects, which include not only the content of the individual arguments, but also the way they are presented. The presentation of arguments is crucial – in particular in the context of dialogical argumentation. However, the effects of different discussion styles on the listener are hard to isolate in human dialogues. In order to demonstrate and investigate various styles of argumentation, we propose a multi-agent system in which different aspects of persuasion can be modelled and investigated separately. Our system utilizes argument structures extracted from text-based reviews for which a minimal bias of the user can be assumed. The persuasive dialogue is modelled as a dialogue game for argumentation that was motivated by the objective to enable both natural and flexible interactions between the agents. In order to support a comparison of factual against affective persuasion approaches, we implemented two fundamentally different strategies for both agents: The logical policy utilizes deep Reinforcement Learning in a multi-agent setup to optimize the strategy with respect to the game formalism and the available argument. In contrast, the emotional policy selects the next move in compliance with an agent emotion that is adapted to user feedback to persuade on an emotional level. The resulting interaction is presented to the user via virtual avatars and can be rated through an intuitive interface.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 1760009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Dubuisson Duplessis ◽  
Alexandre Pauchet ◽  
Nathalie Chaignaud ◽  
Jean-Philippe Kotowicz

Our work aims at designing a dialogue manager dedicated to agents that interact with humans. In this article, we investigate how dialogue patterns at the dialogue act level extracted from Human-Human interactions can be fruitfully used by a software agent to interact with a human.We show how these patterns can be leveraged via a dialogue game structure in order to benefit to the dialogue management process of an agent. We describe how empirically specified dialogue games can be employed on both interpretative and generative levels of dialogue management. We present Dogma, an open-source module that can be used by an agent to manage its conventional communicative behaviour. We show that our library of dialogue games can be used into Dogma to generate fragments of dialogue that are strongly coherent from a human perspective.


2001 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbert-Jan Beun

A dialogue game is presented that enables us to generate coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. Central to this approach is the fact that the cognitive states of players change as a result of the interpretation of speech acts and that these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. The rules of the game are roughly based on the Gricean maxims of co-operation — i.e., agents are forbidden to put forward information they do not believe and are forbidden to ask anything they already believe; the Gricean maxim of relevance is determined by a so-called imbalance in the players’ belief and desire states. As in realistic conversational situations, it is assumed that the information needed to answer a question can be present in a distributed manner. Consequently, the structure of the dialogues may become rather complex, and may result in the generation of counter-questions and sub-dialogues. It will be shown that the structure and the coherence of conversational units do not necessarily have to be the product of a complex planning process or a speech act grammar, but can be based on elementary generation rules that take only into account the local context. As a result, the conversational game does not suffer from the same computational complexity as existing planning models for speech act generation. Although simple in its basic form, the framework enables us to produce abstract conversations with some properties that agree strikingly with dialogue properties found in Conversation Analysis.


1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
R.E. Leenes ◽  
A.R. Lodder ◽  
J.C. Hage

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