Demonstrating the Distinctions Between Persuasion and Deliberation Dialogues

A successful dialogue requires that the participants have a shared understanding of what they are trying to achieve, individually and collectively. This coordination can be achieved if both recognise the type of dialogue in which they are engaged. We focus on two particular dialogue types, action persuasion and deliberation dialogues, which are often conflated because they share similar speech acts. Previously, a clear distinction was made between the two in terms of the different pre- and post-conditions used for the speech acts within these dialogues. This prior work gave formal specifications of the dialogue moves within the dialogues but offered no evaluation through implementation. In this paper, we present an implementation to demonstrate that the two dialogue types described in this way can be realised in software to support focussed communication between autonomous agents. We provide the design and implementation details of our new tool along with an evaluation of the software. The tool we have produced captures the distinctive features of each of the two dialogue types, to make plain their differences and to validate the speech acts for use in practical scenarios.