Extracting dialogical explanations for review aggregations with argumentative dialogical agents

The aggregation of online reviews is fast becoming the chosen method of quality control for users in various domains, from retail to entertainment. Consequently, fair, thorough and explainable aggregation of reviews is increasingly sought-after. We consider the movie review domain, and in particular Rotten Tomatoes' ubiquitous (and arguably over-simplified) aggregation method, the Tomatometer Score (TS). For a movie, this amounts to the percentage of critics giving the movie a positive review. We define a novel form of argumentative dialogical agent (ADA) for explaining the reasoning within the reviews. ADA integrates: 1.) NLP with reviews to extract a Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Framework (QBAF) for any chosen movie to provide the underlying structure of explanations, and 2.) gradual semantics for QBAFs for deriving a dialectical strength measure for movies, as an alternative to the TS, satisfying desirable properties for obtaining explanations. We evaluate ADA using some prominent NLP methods and gradual semantics for QBAFs. We show that they provide a dialectical strength which is comparable with the TS, while at the same time being able to provide dialogical explanations of why a movie obtained its strength via interactions between the user and ADA