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Diplomat: A Conversational Agent Framework for Goal-Oriented Group Discussion

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Contemporary Issues in Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 420))

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Abstract

Recent work in human-computer interaction has explored the use of conversational agents as facilitators for group goal-oriented discussions. Inspired by this work and by the apparent lack of tooling available to support it, we created Diplomat, a Python-based framework for building conversational agent facilitators. Diplomat is designed to support simple specification of agent functionality as well as customizable integration with online chat services. We document a preliminary user study we conducted to help inform the design of Diplomat. We also describe the architecture, capabilities, and limitations of our tool, which we have shared on GitHub.

This work was supported by the United States Office of Naval Research under Contract N000141812767 and partially funded by an NSF REU grant, REU-CAAR, CNS-1952352.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/kevin-hogan/diplomat.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Kevin Hogan, Annabelle Baer & James Purtilo

Authors
  1. Kevin Hogan
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  2. Annabelle Baer
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  3. James Purtilo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kevin Hogan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

    Danielle Costa Morais

  2. Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Liping Fang

  3. University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Masahide Horita

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Hogan, K., Baer, A., Purtilo, J. (2021). Diplomat: A Conversational Agent Framework for Goal-Oriented Group Discussion. In: Morais, D.C., Fang, L., Horita, M. (eds) Contemporary Issues in Group Decision and Negotiation. GDN 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 420. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77208-6_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77208-6_11

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-77208-6

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