13,638 research outputs found
A canonical theory of dynamic decision-making
Decision-making behavior is studied in many very different fields, from medicine and eco- nomics to psychology and neuroscience, with major contributions from mathematics and statistics, computer science, AI, and other technical disciplines. However the conceptual- ization of what decision-making is and methods for studying it vary greatly and this has resulted in fragmentation of the field. A theory that can accommodate various perspectives may facilitate interdisciplinary working. We present such a theory in which decision-making is articulated as a set of canonical functions that are sufficiently general to accommodate diverse viewpoints, yet sufficiently precise that they can be instantiated in different ways for specific theoretical or practical purposes. The canons cover the whole decision cycle, from the framing of a decision based on the goals, beliefs, and background knowledge of the decision-maker to the formulation of decision options, establishing preferences over them, and making commitments. Commitments can lead to the initiation of new decisions and any step in the cycle can incorporate reasoning about previous decisions and the rationales for them, and lead to revising or abandoning existing commitments. The theory situates decision-making with respect to other high-level cognitive capabilities like problem solving, planning, and collaborative decision-making. The canonical approach is assessed in three domains: cognitive and neuropsychology, artificial intelligence, and decision engineering
Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically
In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners’ interactions is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. This endeavor also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by triggering context sensitive collaborative learning support on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL corpus that has been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multidimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools. One major technical contribution of this work is a demonstration that an important piece of the work towards making text classification technology effective for this purpose is designing and building linguistic pattern detectors, otherwise known as features, that can be extracted reliably from texts and that have high predictive power for the categories of discourse actions that the CSCL community is interested in
Impact of Argument Type and Concerns in Argumentation with a Chatbot
Conversational agents, also known as chatbots, are versatile tools that have
the potential of being used in dialogical argumentation. They could possibly be
deployed in tasks such as persuasion for behaviour change (e.g. persuading
people to eat more fruit, to take regular exercise, etc.) However, to achieve
this, there is a need to develop methods for acquiring appropriate arguments
and counterargument that reflect both sides of the discussion. For instance, to
persuade someone to do regular exercise, the chatbot needs to know
counterarguments that the user might have for not doing exercise. To address
this need, we present methods for acquiring arguments and counterarguments, and
importantly, meta-level information that can be useful for deciding when
arguments can be used during an argumentation dialogue. We evaluate these
methods in studies with participants and show how harnessing these methods in a
chatbot can make it more persuasive
Acquiring Correct Knowledge for Natural Language Generation
Natural language generation (NLG) systems are computer software systems that
produce texts in English and other human languages, often from non-linguistic
input data. NLG systems, like most AI systems, need substantial amounts of
knowledge. However, our experience in two NLG projects suggests that it is
difficult to acquire correct knowledge for NLG systems; indeed, every knowledge
acquisition (KA) technique we tried had significant problems. In general terms,
these problems were due to the complexity, novelty, and poorly understood
nature of the tasks our systems attempted, and were worsened by the fact that
people write so differently. This meant in particular that corpus-based KA
approaches suffered because it was impossible to assemble a sizable corpus of
high-quality consistent manually written texts in our domains; and structured
expert-oriented KA techniques suffered because experts disagreed and because we
could not get enough information about special and unusual cases to build
robust systems. We believe that such problems are likely to affect many other
NLG systems as well. In the long term, we hope that new KA techniques may
emerge to help NLG system builders. In the shorter term, we believe that
understanding how individual KA techniques can fail, and using a mixture of
different KA techniques with different strengths and weaknesses, can help
developers acquire NLG knowledge that is mostly correct
Reasoning about Action: An Argumentation - Theoretic Approach
We present a uniform non-monotonic solution to the problems of reasoning
about action on the basis of an argumentation-theoretic approach. Our theory is
provably correct relative to a sensible minimisation policy introduced on top
of a temporal propositional logic. Sophisticated problem domains can be
formalised in our framework. As much attention of researchers in the field has
been paid to the traditional and basic problems in reasoning about actions such
as the frame, the qualification and the ramification problems, approaches to
these problems within our formalisation lie at heart of the expositions
presented in this paper
- …