Strategies For Question Selection In Argumentative Dialogues About Plans

In this article, we present a proposal to enable agents to discuss the suitability of plans based on an argumentation scheme and associated critical questions. Agents coordinate their beliefs, intentions and preferences using a dialogue game based on this argumentation scheme and its critical questions. The detail encompassed by the argumentation scheme means that there is a large number of critical questions, and so dialogues may in principle be very lengthy. To improve the efficiency of dialogues, we present two strategies for selecting questions. We have implemented the system and, here, presented results showing how both strategies are effective in reducing the number of questions required to reach agreement, although their relative effectiveness is dependent on characteristics of the problem domain.