Dialogue Game Research Articles

Explanation–Question–Response dialogue: An argumentative tool for explainable AI

Advancements and deployments of AI-based systems, especially Deep Learning-driven generative language models, have accomplished impressive results over the past few years. Nevertheless, these remarkable achievements are intertwined with a related fear that such technologies might lead to a general relinquishing of our lives’s control to AIs. This concern, which also motivates the increasing interest in the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) research field, is mostly caused by the opacity of the output of deep learning systems and the way that it is generated, which is largely obscure to laypeople. A dialectical interaction with such systems may enhance the users’ understanding and build a more robust trust towards AI. Commonly employed as specific formalisms for modelling intra-agent communications, dialogue games prove to be useful tools to rely upon when dealing with user’s explanation needs. The literature already offers some dialectical protocols that expressly handle explanations and their delivery. This paper fully formalises the novel Explanation–Question–Response (EQR) dialogue and its properties, whose main purpose is to provide satisfactory information (i.e., justified according to argumentative semantics) whilst ensuring a simplified protocol, in comparison with other existing approaches, for humans and artificial agents.

Information-seeking dialogue for explainable artificial intelligence: Modelling and analytics

Explainable artificial intelligence has become a vitally important research field aiming, among other tasks, to justify predictions made by intelligent classifiers automatically learned from data. Importantly, efficiency of automated explanations may be undermined if the end user does not have sufficient domain knowledge or lacks information about the data used for training. To address the issue of effective explanation communication, we propose a novel information-seeking explanatory dialogue game following the most recent requirements to automatically generated explanations. Further, we generalise our dialogue model in form of an explanatory dialogue grammar which makes it applicable to interpretable rule-based classifiers that are enhanced with the capability to provide textual explanations. Finally, we carry out an exploratory user study to validate the corresponding dialogue protocol and analyse the experimental results using insights from process mining and argument analytics. A high number of requests for alternative explanations testifies the need for ensuring diversity in the context of automated explanations.

An explanation-oriented inquiry dialogue game for expert collaborative recommendations

This work presents a requirement analysis for collaborative dialogues among medical experts and an inquiry dialogue game based on this analysis for incorporating explainability into multiagent system design. The game allows experts with different knowledge bases to collaboratively make recommendations while generating rich traces of the reasoning process through combining explanation-based illocutionary forces in an inquiry dialogue. The dialogue game was implemented as a prototype web-application and evaluated against the specification through a formative user study. The user study confirms that the dialogue game meets the needs for collaboration among medical experts. It also provides insights on the real-life value of dialogue-based communication tools for the medical community.

Students’ and facilitators’ experiences with synchronous and asynchronous online dialogic discussions and e-facilitation in understanding the Nature of Science

The existing literature lacks a precise understanding of how online facilitation and dialogic discussions can positively impact students’ comprehension of the Nature of Science (NoS). This study delves into the experiences of students and facilitators engaged in synchronous and asynchronous online dialogic discussions and e-facilitation to enhance our understanding of NoS. An innovative experiment employed a digital dialogue game to engage postgraduate students in a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) secondary science course. The participants included sixty-five PGCE science students and three lecturers specializing in different science disciplines (Physics, Chemistry, and Biology). Qualitative data collection methods and analysis, including transcripts of online discussions about NoS topics, were followed by critical event recall interviews to identify specific online dialogue events that significantly contributed to the comprehension of NoS. The findings contribute significantly to comprehending students’ processes in grasping complex and debatable topics such as Nature of Science (NoS) within online dialogic discussions supported by e-facilitation. They emphasize the importance of establishing an open and expansive dialogic space, with a focus on the crucial roles of e-facilitators. The results also highlight a tension between active and passive roles in both synchronous and asynchronous online discussions. Additionally, the study sheds light on the influence of space, time, and texts in understanding NoS through e-facilitated online dialogic discussions. Notably, the research emphasizes the live chat room’s significance within Interloc, accentuating its role as a social space fostering a sense of community and a safe environment for inquiry in online dialogue which supported understanding NoS.

Is Syntax Separate or Shared Between Arabic and English? Syntactic Priming in Arabic-English Bilinguals

Syntactic priming refers to the likelihood that a particular structure is repeated when preceded by an utterance with the same or a related syntactic structure. Experimental studies that demonstrate syntactic priming have attracted the attention of scholars because syntactic priming provides insightful information about the way language is processed in the human cognitive system, facilitates dialogue and informs linguistic theories about the knowledge of language that is activated via syntactic priming. In this study, we investigate syntactic priming in 15 Arabic-English bilinguals through the Confederate-Scripted Dialogue Game technique, targeting four structures: active, passive, double-object (DO), and prepositional-object structures (PO). The results of the study indicate that the syntax of Arabic-English bilinguals is separate for each language. Participants tend to use the active structure regardless of the structure of the prime sentence. The findings of this study illustrate how the syntax of two unrelated languages (Arabic and English) is represented and processed in bilingual brains, contributing to the fields of bilingualism, syntax, psycholinguistics, and second language acquisition.

Dialogue games and deductive information: a dialogical account of the concept of virtual information

Dialogue games and deductive information: a dialogical account of the concept of virtual information

Questions as Dialogue Games. The Pragmatic Dimensions of “Authentic” Questions

AbstractQuestions, and more specifically authentic questions, are at the core of dialogue-based learning and teaching. However, what is a question, and how can it be authentic? This paper addresses this problem by analyzing the distinct dimensions of questions, showing how their pragmatic nature is interwoven with the syntactic and semantic one, and how it can be grasped only by considering their dialogical functions. Questions are maintained to be proposals of different dialogue games (or types), pursuing specific interactional purposes, and potentially contributing to learning processes in different ways. By understanding how questions shape different dialogues it is possible to ask more suitable questions to the questioner’s goals. In this framework, the dichotomy between authentic and inauthentic questions becomes a strategic choice between different types of dialogical possibilities.

An Interleaving Semantics of the Timed Concurrent Language for Argumentation to Model Debates and Dialogue Games

AbstractTime is a crucial factor in modelling dynamic behaviours of intelligent agents: activities have a determined temporal duration in a real-world environment, and previous actions influence agents’ behaviour. In this paper, we propose a language for modelling concurrent interaction between agents that also allows the specification of temporal intervals in which particular actions occur. Such a language exploits a timed version of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks to realise a shared memory used by the agents to communicate and reason on the acceptability of their beliefs with respect to a given time interval. An interleaving model on a single processor is used for basic computation steps, with maximum parallelism for time elapsing. Following this approach, only one of the enabled agents is executed at each moment. To demonstrate the capabilities of the language, we also show how it can be used to model interactions such as debates and dialogue games taking place between intelligent agents. Lastly, we present an implementation of the language that can be accessed via a web interface.

Learning second language morphosyntax in dialogue under explicit and implicit conditions: An experimental study with advanced adult learners of German

AbstractWe investigate the role of awareness in learning non-salient grammar features in a second language during oral interaction. We conducted a learning experiment during which forty-eight adult Dutch-speaking advanced learners of German and a native German-speaking experimenter engaged in a scripted oral dialogue game. The experimenter and learner in turn produced sentences based on pictures eliciting German strong verbs with stem-vowel alternations, a morphosyntactic feature that represents a persistent learning difficulty. While learners in the implicit condition were merely instructed to focus on sentence meaning, learners in the explicit condition were encouraged to also pay attention to and learn from the target structure in the experimenter's input. Although the explicit group achieved higher accuracy scores overall, both groups had similar (absolute) learning gains, showing that oral input provided during interactive exchanges can lead to substantial learning not only under explicit, learning-targeted conditions, but also without an explicit directive to learn.

Question(Ing) Strategies in British Political News Interviews: Grilling The Interlocutors as a Strategic Weapon

Every dialogue is constrained by a rigid framework, which manifests itself in its linear character (an initial-continuation-counter move structure or a question-answer relationship and dismissal-argumentation order of dialogue), and which illustrates the functional dependencies between sentences or sequences of sentences. The following study focuses on the discourse-pragmatic notion of the interviewer’s text-forming strategies, and, in particular, the question-answer relationship of political news interviews in Great Britain. Attention is focused on the questioning strategies employed by Andrew Marr in The Andrew Marr Show. Various types of questions within epistemic logic, which act as the strategic repertoire of the participants in dialogue games (Carlson 1983), are examined. The list of question types includes indirect and direct questions, where the former refer to sentential (yes-no), search (wh-questions), conditional, alternative, tag, ellipted, disjunctive or conjunctive questions (as instances of multiple questions), and the latter to questions presupposing the accomplishment of the specific epistemic state. Andrew Marr, as a dominant participant in this dialogue game, at least with reference to his role that presupposes topic control (selection and change of topics), will use this strategic weapon to influence the politicians’ performance and make them account for their political actions.

Sphere of We: Gadamer and the Dialogic Game

Fundamentados em Verdade e Método I e II, apresentamos, nesse artigo, a concepção gadameriana da linguagem no jogo dialógico. Inspirado em clássicos como Platão, Aristóteles e Heidegger tardio, Hans-Georg Gadamer desenvolveu a Hermenêutica Filosófica como uma nova perspectiva para o compreender (Verstehen), já não a partir da noção de método, mas como um jogo entre o movimento da tradição e do intérprete. Assim, entende-se que o ser humano está em uma situação, é sustentado por preconceitos e possui, por isso, um horizonte de sentido, uma perspectiva da realidade, embora sempre provisória e limitada. Gadamer destacou o lugar do ‘entre’ como o verdadeiro local da hermenêutica. Sendo um defensor do diálogo, é central em suas obras a construção de um sentido comum, do acordo, sendo a ‘boa vontade’ e a solidariedade atitudes cruciais.

A laboratory study of naturalistic second language learning: Acquiring grammatical gender from simple dialogue.

The aim of this study was twofold: first, to develop an experimental technique as a tool to investigate learning outcomes of spontaneous, naturalistic second language (L2) learning under controlled laboratory conditions; and second, to explore how this technique can be used to understand the basic conditions and limits of this learning. Two variants of a dialogue game were tested in which corrective L2 input was provided to the learners, but the learning aspect was camouflaged. Participants were German learners of Dutch who are known to display persistent grammatical gender errors in Dutch owing to incorrect first language (L1)-L2 transfer. In Experiment 1, the participant and a 'virtual partner' (audio-recordings) took turns in describing cards using gender-marked article-noun phrases. However, the majority of the participants became aware of learning articles as goal of the experiment, either because of the way we asked participants about the goal of the experiment or because of the task used. Therefore, we changed both aspects and used a dialogue-memory game in Experiment 2, which indeed led only a minority (28%) to suspect the real goal of the study. In both experiments, participants showed substantial learning of word gender (on average 13.8 percentage points increase in accuracy) after only one instance of correct input. A manipulation of the number of trials (lag) between correct input and production did not affect results. Furthermore, the 72% of 'naïve' participants in Experiment 2 showed as much learning as the full sample. Thus, the new paradigm offers important insights into the determinants of naturalistic learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

An Interactive Recommendation System for Decision Making Based on the Characterization of Cognitive Tasks

The decision-making process can be complex and underestimated, where mismanagement could lead to poor results and excessive spending. This situation appears in highly complex multi-criteria problems such as the project portfolio selection (PPS) problem. Therefore, a recommender system becomes crucial to guide the solution search process. To our knowledge, most recommender systems that use argumentation theory are not proposed for multi-criteria optimization problems. Besides, most of the current recommender systems focused on PPS problems do not attempt to justify their recommendations. This work studies the characterization of cognitive tasks involved in the decision-aiding process to propose a framework for the Decision Aid Interactive Recommender System (DAIRS). The proposed system focuses on a user-system interaction that guides the search towards the best solution considering a decision-maker’s preferences. The developed framework uses argumentation theory supported by argumentation schemes, dialogue games, proof standards, and two state transition diagrams (STD) to generate and explain its recommendations to the user. This work presents a prototype of DAIRS to evaluate the user experience on multiple real-life case simulations through a usability measurement. The prototype and both STDs received a satisfying score and mostly overall acceptance by the test users.

EVA 2.0: Emotional and rational multimodal argumentation between virtual agents

Abstract Persuasive argumentation depends on multiple aspects, which include not only the content of the individual arguments, but also the way they are presented. The presentation of arguments is crucial – in particular in the context of dialogical argumentation. However, the effects of different discussion styles on the listener are hard to isolate in human dialogues. In order to demonstrate and investigate various styles of argumentation, we propose a multi-agent system in which different aspects of persuasion can be modelled and investigated separately. Our system utilizes argument structures extracted from text-based reviews for which a minimal bias of the user can be assumed. The persuasive dialogue is modelled as a dialogue game for argumentation that was motivated by the objective to enable both natural and flexible interactions between the agents. In order to support a comparison of factual against affective persuasion approaches, we implemented two fundamentally different strategies for both agents: The logical policy utilizes deep Reinforcement Learning in a multi-agent setup to optimize the strategy with respect to the game formalism and the available argument. In contrast, the emotional policy selects the next move in compliance with an agent emotion that is adapted to user feedback to persuade on an emotional level. The resulting interaction is presented to the user via virtual avatars and can be rated through an intuitive interface.

Animation and myth of the hero as discursive device in Mexican political campaigns

Abstract A political campaign is a dialogical game that will always make a deployment of discursive resources that manage to generate empathy and in that way, obtain the vote of the people. Animation and myth are resources that politicians use in their favor to construct their messages. The reason? These elements are exceptional dialogical units thanks to their power of meaning and cohesion on a personal and social level. This research focus in two Mexican politicians Alfredo del Mazo and Andres Manuel López Obrador, who during their elections – 2017 and 2018, respectively – used digital animation to create a striking propaganda. The critical frame is based on Joseph Campbell, Rollo May, Carlos A. Scolari, Clifford Geertz and Edna Becerril.

Dialogue Games for Minimal Logic

In this paper, we define a class of dialogue games for Johansson’s minimal logic and prove that it corresponds to the validity of minimal logic. Many authors have stated similar results for intuitionistic and classical logic either with or without actually proving the correspondence. Rahman, Clerbout and Keiff [17] have already specified dialogues for minimal logic; however, they transformed it into Fitch-style natural deduction only. We propose a different specification for minimal logic with the proof of correspondence between the existence of winning strategies for the Proponent in this class of games and the sequent calculus for minimal logic.

La aserción dialógica como unidad mínima de conocimiento

El objetivo del presente artículo es proponer la noción deCaserción dialógica como unidad mínima de conocimiento dentro del enfoque del pragmatismo dialógico. Defendemos que esta unidad mínima es el diálogo para la tesis p, acompañada de su juego interactivo y dinámico de dar y pedir razones (nivel dialógico de partida) para una estrategia ganadora del proponente. Exploramos entonces el problema a partir del marco semántico propuesto por Shahid Rahman para presentar una definición dialógica del concepto. Además, con ello mostramos cómo la noción de proposición deja de ser el concepto lógico primordial y es reemplazado por la noción de aserción como acto dentro del proceso del juego de un diálogo y siguiendo las ideas principales de Brandom (1994, 2000) y Martin-Löf (1984). Este enfoque pragmático de la lógica abandona la idea de que la proposición es la unidad lógica mínima de conocimiento verdadero.

Interactive Alignment and Lexical Triggering of Code-Switching in Bilingual Dialogue.

When bilingual speakers use two languages in the same utterance, this is called code-switching. Previous research indicates that bilinguals’ likelihood to code-switch is enhanced when the utterance to be produced (1) contains a word with a similar form across languages (lexical triggering) and (2) is preceded by a code-switched utterance, for example from a dialogue partner (interactive alignment/priming of code-switching). Both factors have mostly been tested on corpus data and have not yet been studied in combination. In two experiments, we therefore investigated the combined effects of interactive alignment and lexical triggering on code-switching. In Experiment 1, Dutch-English bilinguals described pictures to each other in a dialogue game where a confederate’s code-switching was manipulated. The participants were free to use either Dutch, English, or a combination of Dutch and English in describing the pictures, so they could voluntarily code-switch or not. The pictures contained a cognate [e.g., roos (rose)], a false friend [e.g., rok (skirt, false friend with rock)], or a control word [e.g., jas (coat)]. Participants code-switched more often when the confederate had just code-switched (indicating interactive alignment). They also code-switched more often when cognates were involved, but only when the confederate had just code-switched. This indicates that lexical triggering is driven by interactive alignment. False friends did not enhance the likelihood of code-switching. Experiment 2 used a similar dialogue game with participants from the same population but focused specifically on how to account for interactive alignment of code-switching. Rather than aligning on their dialogue partner’s pragmatic act of code-switching, bilinguals aligned on the language activation from the utterance produced by their dialogue partner. All in all, the results show how co-activation of languages at multiple levels of processing together influence bilinguals’ tendency to code-switch. The findings call for a perspective on bilingual language production in which cross-speaker and cross-language processes are combined.

Jugar con la Escultura.

A lo largo del siglo XX se ha resaltado la importancia del proceso de creación y la estética interactiva. Dividido en cuatro epígrafes, en este artículo vamos a analizar e interpretar en particular en la obra de Miguel Berrocal: 1) El valor seminal de la imaginación en las artes y en las ciencias; 2) Descubrir dibujando; 3) Códice Berrocaliensis; 4) Estética interactiva, con el fin de argumentar que, a partir de una imaginación creadora, apoyada en la capacidad analítica y descubridora del dibujo, Berrocal desmonta la escultura, explorando la cuarta dimensión, y contribuyendo a incrementar el juego dialógico entre la obra y los receptores.

Overlapping Mechanisms in Implying and Inferring.

Prior psychological work on Gricean implicature has revealed much about how listeners infer (comprehension) but little about how speakers imply (production). This is surprising given the inherent link between the two. This study aimed to obtain a more integral understanding of implicatures by investigating the processes that are shared between inference and implication. In two experiments, a participant and a confederate engaged in a dialogue game that invited the use of implicatures. In each there was a global priming manipulation, in which a confederate predominantly used implicit or explicit utterances, and a local priming manipulation, in which the utterance structure varied from trial to trial. Participants could choose whether to imply or use an explicit expression. Our results revealed that speaker and listener align on their use of implicatures. We interpret the local priming results as providing evidence of shared implicature representations between speaker and listener, and the global priming results as a form of audience design. We also present a model of implicature production that explains our findings.