Open Access

Klaus Weber, Natalie Hogh, Cristina Conati, Elisabeth André

• A natural way to resolve different points of view and form opinions is through exchanging arguments and knowledge. Facing the vast amount of available information on the internet, people tend to focus on information consistent with their beliefs. To support a fair and unbiased opinion-building process, we propose an intelligent agent in the form of a chatbot that engages in a deliberative dialogue with a human. In contrast to persuasive systems, the chatbot aims to provide a diverse and representative overview - embedded in a conversation with the user. To account for a reflective and unbiased exploration of the topic, we enable the system to intervene if the user is too focused on their pre-existing opinion. To achieve that, the agent employs a metric to assess the user’s focus on challenger arguments. We report on a user study with 45 participants showing that the intervention significantly affects the user’s focus on challenger arguments. We further report significant main effectsA natural way to resolve different points of view and form opinions is through exchanging arguments and knowledge. Facing the vast amount of available information on the internet, people tend to focus on information consistent with their beliefs. To support a fair and unbiased opinion-building process, we propose an intelligent agent in the form of a chatbot that engages in a deliberative dialogue with a human. In contrast to persuasive systems, the chatbot aims to provide a diverse and representative overview - embedded in a conversation with the user. To account for a reflective and unbiased exploration of the topic, we enable the system to intervene if the user is too focused on their pre-existing opinion. To achieve that, the agent employs a metric to assess the user’s focus on challenger arguments. We report on a user study with 45 participants showing that the intervention significantly affects the user’s focus on challenger arguments. We further report significant main effects of intervention on the user’s attention to crucial areas of the system, and report on multiple interaction effects of user characteristics.…