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Measuring the Strength of Rhetorical Arguments

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Multi-Agent Systems and Agreement Technologies (EUMAS 2020, AT 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12520))

Abstract

Rhetorical arguments are used in negotiation dialogues when a proponent agent tries to persuade his opponent to accept a proposal more readily. When more than one argument is generated, the proponent must compare them in order to select the most adequate for his interests. A way of comparing them is by means of their strength values. Related articles propose a calculation based only on the components of the rhetorical arguments, i.e., the importance of the opponent’s goal and the certainty level of the beliefs that make up the argument. This article aims to propose a model for the measurement of the strength of rhetorical arguments, which is inspired on the pre-conditions of credibility and preferability stated by Guerini and Castelfranchi. Thus, we suggest the use of two new criteria to the strength calculation: the credibility of the proponent and the status of the opponent’s goal in the goal processing cycle. The model is empirically evaluated and the results demonstrate that the proposed model is more efficient than previous works of the state of the art in terms of number of exchanged arguments and number of reached agreements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    When an agent uses rhetorical arguments to back their proposals, the negotiation is called persuasive negotiation [17].

  2. 2.

    Literals are atoms or negation of atoms (the negation of an atom A is denoted \(\lnot A\)).

  3. 3.

    The threshold is a value used in the strength calculation model. This is better explained in Sect. 4.

  4. 4.

    Baarslag et al. [6] present a survey about some techniques of opponent modeling that are based on learning. Other works about opponent modelling with focus on argumentation are [10,11,12, 18].

  5. 5.

    The estimate value of reputation is formed and updated over time with the help of different sources of information. Several computational models of reputation consider that reputation can be estimated based on two different sources: (i) the direct interactions and (ii) the information provided by other members of the society about experiences they had in the past (e.g., [15, 19, 20]).

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Acknowledgements

Mariela Morveli-Espinoza is financed by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), Brazil. Juan Carlos Nieves was partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement nº 825619 (AI4EU project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering (CPGEI), Federal University of Technology of Parana (UTFPR), Curitiba, Brazil

    Mariela Morveli-Espinoza & Cesar Augusto Tacla

  2. Department of Computing Science of Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Juan Carlos Nieves

Authors
  1. Mariela Morveli-Espinoza
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  2. Juan Carlos Nieves
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  3. Cesar Augusto Tacla
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Correspondence to Mariela Morveli-Espinoza .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Nick Bassiliades

  2. Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece

    Georgios Chalkiadakis

  3. IIIA-CSIC, Bellaterra, Spain

    Dave de Jonge

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Morveli-Espinoza, M., Nieves, J.C., Tacla, C.A. (2020). Measuring the Strength of Rhetorical Arguments. In: Bassiliades, N., Chalkiadakis, G., de Jonge, D. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Agreement Technologies. EUMAS AT 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12520. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66412-1_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66412-1_26

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66411-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66412-1

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