Computer-Driven Persuasive Dialogue: A Multi-Layer Reasoning Framework

Human computer dialogue systems – despite being the subject of a long research – are limited to a few restricted domains and are still considered austere by their users. There is evidence that humans act differently when engaged in computer dialogue than during human to human dialogue (Shechtman & Horowitz 2003). This is because dialogue systems do not take into account aspects contributing to the natural effect of human to human conversation, such as emotions and social cues. Our current research focuses on using human-computer dialogue for health-care counselling. In particular, we are developing a dialogue system that should be capable of changing the user health behaviour based on techniques of persuasion and argumentation. In our opinion, natural argumentation – and especially persuasive argumentation – needs to show empathy and use social cues to be effective (Andrews, De Boni, &Manandhar 2006). We describe here the design of a multi layer framework to separate the persuasion planning and the management of surface-level dialogue cues.