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

Conversational Agents for Mental Health and Well-being: Discovering Design Recommendations Using Text Mining

Conversational agents are increasingly being used by the general population due to shortages in healthcare providers and specialists, and limited access to treatments. They are also used by people to deal with loneliness and lack of companionship. As these apps are increasingly replacing real humans, there is a need to explore their design features and limitations for better design of conversational apps. Using text mining and topic modeling, this study analyzed a total of 126,610 reviews about Replika, a popular and well-established conversational agent mobile app. Our results emphasized current practices for designing conversational apps while at the same time sheds the light on limitations associated with these apps. Such limitations are related to the need for better conversations and intelligent responses, the need for advanced AI chatbots, the need to avoid questionable and inappropriate content, the need for inclusive design, and the need to address some technical limitations