Empirical Methods for Modelling Persuadees in Dialogical Argumentation

For a participant to play persuasive arguments in a dialogue, s/he may create a model of the other participants. This may include an estimation of what arguments the other participants find believable, convincing, or appealing. The participant can then choose to put forward those arguments that have high scores in the desired criteria. In this paper, we consider how we can crowd-source opinions on the believability, convincingness, and appeal of arguments, and how we can use this information to predict opinions for specific participants on the believability, convincingness, and appeal of specific arguments. We evaluate our approach by crowd-sourcing opinions from 50 participants about 30 arguments. We also discuss how this form of user modelling can be used in a decision-theoretic approach to choosing moves in dialogical argumentation.