A Human-Computer Dialogue System for Educational Debate: A Computational Dialectics Approach

This paper reports research concerning issues involved in adopting a computational dialectics approach to develop a human-computer dialogue system for educational debate. In particular, we propose a dialogue model and a set of computationally usable strategic heuristics to enable the computer to engage its users in debate on a controversial issue. The system operationalising the proposed dialogue model and strategy has been fully implemented. It has also been subject to initial evaluation exercises. The results of the evaluation are essentially favourable. It is anticipated that the work reported in this paper will contribute toward the development of human-computer dialogue in general and of computer-based educational debate in particular, and help to illuminate research issues in the field of dialectics itself.