Human-Agent Dialogues and their Purposes

Abstract

A common conversation between an older adult and a nurse about health-related issues includes topics such as troubles with sleep, reasons for walking around nighttime, pain conditions, etc. Such a dialogue can be regarded as a "natural" dialogue emerging from the participating agents' lines of thinking, their roles, needs and motives, while switching between topics as the dialogue unfolds. The purpose of this work is to define a generic conceptual model of purposeful human-agent dialogue activity including different types of argumentation dialogues, suitable for health-related topics. This is done based on analyses of a scenario, persona and models of human behaviour. The model will be shared between the human and the agent, allowing for adaptation to the human's reasoning, needs and motives.