Efficiency in Persuasion Dialogues

Inquiry, Persuasion and Deliberation Dialogues are all designed to transfer information between agents so that their beliefs and opinions may be revised in the light of the new information, and all make use of a similar set of speech acts. These dialogues also have significant differences. We define success conditions for some different dialogue types in this family and note the pragmatic implications of the speech acts they employ. Focusing on persuasion we consider how successful persuasion dialogues can be conducted efficiently, in terms of minimising the expected transfer of information. We observe that a strategy for efficient persuasion can be developed by considering the pragmatic implications. We present results showing that our strategy is an optimal strategy in a range of representative persuasion scenarios.