Designing Persuasive Dialogue Systems: Using Argumentation with Care

Persuasive dialogue systems that aim to change people’s attitudes and behaviours have drawn much attention in recent years due to their great practical potential. Current systems rely heavily on argumentation and advicegiving to form their persuasive messages. Many findings in psychology, and some counselling intervention methods such as Motivational Interviewing (MI) dispute this confrontational approach. Our project sets out to investigate whether MI can provide an alternative way to develop a more effective system.

In this paper, we discuss the limitations of the argumentation-based approach, review a number of argumentation-based systems, and present the results of an evaluation study which compares people’s perception of the persuasibility of two argumentation-based dialogues and a MI-based counterpart. Our results show a higher perceived persuasiveness for the MI-based dialogue.