Calculating the Strength of Rhetorical Arguments in Persuasive Negotiation Dialogues

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 work 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 work aims to propose a model for the calculation 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 in terms of number of exchanged arguments and number of reached agreements.

Keywords

• rhetorical arguments
• persuasive negotiation dialogues
• strength calculation