An inquiry dialogue system

Abstract

The majority of existing work on agent dialogues considers negotiation, persuasion or deliberation dialogues; we focus on inquiry dialogues, which allow agents to collaborate in order to find new knowledge. We present a general framework for representing dialogues and give the details necessary to generate two subtypes of inquiry dialogue that we define: argument inquiry dialogues allow two agents to share knowledge to jointly construct arguments; warrant inquiry dialogues allow two agents to share knowledge to jointly construct dialectical trees (essentially a tree with an argument at each node in which a child node is a counter argument to its parent). Existing inquiry dialogue systems only model dialogues, meaning they provide a protocol which dictates what the possible legal next moves are but not which of these moves to make. Our system not only includes a dialogue-game style protocol for each subtype of inquiry dialogue that we present, but also a strategy that selects exactly one of the legal moves to make. We propose a benchmark against which we compare our dialogues, being the arguments that can be constructed from the union of the agents' beliefs, and use this to define soundness and completeness properties that we show hold for all inquiry dialogues generated by our system.

Formal reconciliatory dialogue based on shift from forward to backward deliberation†

“…On the other hand, this paper has the limitation that dialogue protocols allow agents to use only practical syllogisms and allow them to attack only moves except facts. We think that our work can be extended to a general reconciliatory dialogue by utilising the persuasion dialogues mentioned above and inquiry dialogues (Black and Hunter, 2009) allowing agents to share knowledge to jointly construct arguments or dialectical trees.…”

Agreeing What to Do

“…Our proposal follows the approach in [5,13] but the types of moves are different, and the protocol and strategy functions are substantially altered from those presented in either [5] or [13]. This alteration is necessary as neither of [5,13] allow agents to participate in deliberation dialogues.…”

“…This alteration is necessary as neither of [5,13] allow agents to participate in deliberation dialogues. In [13], a dialogue system is presented for epistemic inquiry dialogues; it allows agents to jointly construct argument graphs (where the arguments refer only to beliefs) and to use a shared defeat relation to determine the acceptability of particular arguments.…”

An Implemented Dialogue System for Inquiry and Persuasion

“…Work on agent-based dialogue systems has been greatly influenced by the dialogue typology of Walton and Krabbe [12]. A number of proposals have been set out for dialogue systems that encompass the main dialogue categories, for example see: [4] for inquiry dialogues; [10] for negotiation; [9] for persuasion; [8] for deliberation. However, very little work has been done on specifying and implementing systems that combine two or more dialogue types.…”

“…If r = 1, then this dialogue is considered a top level dialogue whose type is pAct, which is opened by the dialogue initiator. If the top level dialogue is closed then the dialogue game is over 4 …”