Comfort or safety? Gathering and using the concerns of a participant for better persuasion
Emmanuel Hadoux, Anthony Hunter · Argument & Computation · 2019
Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. A key dimension for determining whether an argument is good is the impact that it has on the concerns of the intended audience of the argument ( e.g., the other participant(s) in the dialogue). In this paper, we investigate how we can acquire and represent concerns of a participant, and her preferences over them, and we show how this can be used for selecting good moves in a persuasion dialogue. We provide results from empirical studies showing that: (1) we can gather preferences over types of concern; (2) there is a common understanding of what is meant by concerns; (3) participants tend to make moves according to their preferences; and (4) the persuader can use these preferences to improve the persuasiveness of a dialogue.