Measures for persuasion dialogs: A preliminary investigation

Abstract. Persuasion is one of the main types of dialogs encountered in everyday life. The basic idea behind a persuasion is that two (or more) agents disagree on a state of affairs, and each one tries to persuade the other to change his mind. For that purpose, agents exchange arguments of different strengths. Several systems, grounded on argumentation theory, have been proposed in the literature for modeling persuasion dialogs. These systems have studied more or less deeply the different protocols required for this kind of dialogs, and have investi-gated different termination criteria. However, nothing is said about the properties of the generated dialogs, nor on the behavior of the interacting agents. Besides, an-alyzing dialogs is a usual task in everyday life. For instance, political debates are generally deeply dissected. In this paper we define measures for analyzing dialogs from the point of view of an external agent. In particular, three kinds of measures are proposed: i) measures of the quality of the exchanged arguments in terms of their strengths, ii) measures of the behavior of each participating agent in terms of its coherence, its aggressiveness in the dialog, and finally in terms of the novelty of its arguments, iii) measures of the quality of the dialog itself in terms of the relevance and usefulness of its moves