User-Centric Principles in Automated Decision Making

Natural-language preference expressions, not yet exploited by existing preference reasoning approaches, match the way users express preferences in many scenarios and potentially improve automated decision making. Further, the preferences provided are often not sufficient to make a choice on behalf of users, as trade-offs are resolved with psychological processes employed in light of available options. We thus propose a decision making technique that reasons about preferences expressed in a user-centric language and incorporates principles of trade-off contrast and extremeness aversion, as in human decision-making.