A Formal Argumentation Framework for Deliberation Dialogues

Abstract

Abstract. Agents engage in deliberation dialogues to collectively decide on a course of action. To solve conflicts of opinion that arise, they can question claims and supply arguments. Existing models fail to capture the interplay between the provided arguments as well as successively selecting a winner from the proposals. This paper introduces a general framework for agent deliberation dialogues that uses an explicit reply structure to produce coherent dialogues, guides in outcome selection and provide pointers for agent strategies.

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

“…Hitchcock, McBurney, and Parsons (2001) and McBurney, Hitchcock, and Parsons (2007) propose deliberation dialogue frameworks, for example, DDF (McBurney et al, 2007), equipped with fundamental elements for deliberation dialogues such as locutions, commitments, and termination. Kok et al (2010) give an argumentation framework for deliberation dialogue taking into account agent's preference. However, these frameworks do not address evaluation of their correctness.…”

“…Hamblin's formal dialectics (1970) explores descriptive or formal dialogue systems. Because formal dialogue systems can give agents rational interaction and computation mechanisms under uncertain, incomplete, inconsistent, subjective, and distributed information, they have received attention from researchers working on formal argumentation (Fan and Toni, 2012;Kok, Meyer, Prakken, and Vreeswijk, 2010;Prakken, 2006Prakken, , 2005Wells and Reed, 2006). However, little work has been done for dialogue systems for reconciling conflict not only by searching for means of satisfying either all or part of given desires, but also by searching for means for satisfying their underlying desires behind the given ones.…”

Preferences in artificial intelligence

“…Some approaches assume a particular logic [215] while others do not specify the underlying logic [40,97]. Argumentation theory is central within artificial intelligence [27] as it provides a logic-based formalism for the treatment of defeasible reasoning and conflict resolution [241,6,154,188,33], negotiation [245,163,11], and argumentation-based dialogues [13,214,158].…”

A Methodology for the Generation of Multi-agent Argumentation Dialogue Scenarios

“…This paper shows a methodology to generate scenarios that accomodate for argumentation with structured arguments while strongly reflecting the characteristics of deliberation dialogue type as identified from the existing literature on argumentation-based dialogues [1,4,5]:…”

“…Although the full dynamics of an argumentation-based deliberation dialogue model are not needed for this paper, it is still good to briefly cover the interplay between agents, arguments and the proposals. The multi-agent deliberation model here is a simplification from that of Kok et al [4].…”