Context
Persuasion is an activity that involves one party trying to induce another party to believe something or to do something. It is an important and multifaceted human facility. Obviously, sales and marketing is heavily dependent on persuasion. But many other activities involve persuasion such as a doctor persuading a patient to drink less alcohol, a road safety expert persuading drivers to not text while driving, or an online safety expert persuading users of social media sites to not reveal too much personal information online. As computing becomes involved in every sphere of life, so too is persuasion a target for applying computer-based solutions.
Many of the current persuasion technologies for behaviour change (e.g. for encouraging healthier life styles) are based on some combination of questionnaires for finding out information from users, provision of information for directing the users to better behaviour, computer games to enable users to explore different scenario concerning their behaviour, provision of diaries for getting users to record ongoing behaviour, and messages to remind the user to continue with the better behaviour.
Interestingly, argumentation is not central to the current manifestations of persuasion technologies. The arguments for good behaviour seem either to be assumed before the user accesses the persuasion technology (e.g. when using diaries, or receiving email reminders), or arguments are provided implicitly in the persuasion technology (e.g. through provision of information, or through game playing).
So explicit consideration of arguments and counterarguments are not supported with existing persuasion technologies. Yet in real-world persuasion, in particular in applications such as behaviour change, presenting convincing arguments, and presenting counterarguments to the user's arguments, is critically important. For example, for a doctor to persuade a patient to drink less alcohol, the doctor has to give good arguments why it is better for the patient to drink less, and for how it is possible.
In this project, we intend to bring argumentation into a new generation of persuasion technologies. An automated persuasion system (APS) is a system that can engage in a dialogue with a user (the persuadee) in order to persuade the persuadee to do (or not do) some action or to believe (or not believe) something. To do this, an APS aims to use convincing arguments in order to persuade the persuadee.
The dialogue may involve moves including queries, claims, and importantly, arguments that are presented according to some protocol. The dialogue may be asymmetric since the kinds of moves that the APS can present may be different to the moves that the persuadee may make. For instance, the persuadee might be restricted to only making arguments by selecting them from a menu (in order to obviate the need for natural language processing of arguments being entered). In the extreme, it may be that only the APS can make moves. Whether an argument is convincing depends on the context and on the characteristics of the persuadee. An APS maintains a model of the persuadee, and this is harnessed by the strategy of the APS in order to choose good moves to make in the dialogue.
Computational persuasion is the study of formal models of dialogues involving arguments and counterarguments, of user models, and strategies, for APSs. The overall goal of this project is to develop a formal framework for computational persuasion. This framework will extend recent developments in computational models of argument. The emphasis will be on APSs that will help users in changing behaviour (e.g. to persuade the user to drink less, or to not text while driving).
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Subject
You will be asked to work on the model of a user that will be used to improve the efficiency of persuasion methods.
At the very beginning of the dialogue, the persuader has a uniform initial distribution representing the belief of the persuadee in the arguments.
In this internship, we want to explore how a theoretical profile of a user can be created. In conjunction with a theoretical profile for arguments, the purpose is to learn a refinement of the initial distribution in order to compute one that is more precise than the uniform one, with respect to the profile of the user and the arguments available in the dialogue.
This work also needs to be extended in order to tackle the issue of the update of the belief, process that can be different from one user to another.
An optional step during this internship is to carry on experiments with actual human users.
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Practical information
The time will be split in two parts. Three months being spent in Paris and three months in London following this schedule:
* 1st month, France, State of the art, getting used to the topic
* 2nd month, France, beginning of the theory, with UK on Skype
* 3rd month, UK, "end" of the theory with France on Skype
* 4th-5th month, UK, implementation and potential extension of the theory
* 6th month, France, thesis writing
This internship is supported by the ANR project AMANDE. It is part of a collaboration between LIP6, UPMC and University College London.