Planning for Persuasion

We aim to find a winning strategy that determines the arguments a proponent should assert during a dialogue such that it will successfully persuade its opponent of some goal arguments, regardless of the strategy employed by the opponent. By restricting the strategies we consider for the proponent to what we call simple strategies and by modelling this as a planning problem, we are able to use an automated planner to generate optimal simple strategies for realistically sized problems. These strategies guarantee with a certain probability (determined by the proponent’s uncertain model of the arguments available to the opponent) that the proponent will be successful no matter which arguments the opponent chooses to assert. Our model accounts for the possibility that the proponent, when asserting arguments, may give away knowledge that the opponent can subsequently use against it; we examine how this affects both time taken to find an optimal simple strategy and its probability of guaranteed success.