Recognizing Intentions from Rejoinders in a Bayesian Interactive Argumentation System

We describe a mechanism which recognizes a user’s intentions from short-form rejoinders to arguments generated from Bayesian networks. The mechanism builds candidate reasoning paths that link the user’s rejoinder with a previously presented argument, and considers the following factors to select a path: linguistic clues, the impact of the user’s rejoinder on the system’s argument along the different paths, the user’s attentional focus, and the system’s confidence in its representation of the user’s beliefs. The results of our preliminary evaluation indicate that the interpretations produced by our mechanism are generally appropriate.