Assessing debate strategies via computational agents

This paper reports our research concerning dialogue strategies suitable for adoption by a human– computer debating system. We propose a set of strategic heuristics for a computer to adopt to enable it to function as a dialogue participant. In particular, we consider means of assessing the proposed strategy. A system involving two agents in dialogue with each other and a human– agent debate system are constructed and subsequently used to facilitate the evaluations. The evaluations suggest that the proposed strategy can enable the computer to act as an effective dialogue participant. It is anticipated that this work will contribute towards the development of computerised dialogue systems and help to illuminate research issues concerning strategies in dialectical systems.