Debbie, the Debate Bot of the Future

TL;DR

Debbie is a new dialogue system designed to select and use arguments in conversations, aiming to improve argumentative chatbots with a prototype and initial evaluation.

Contribution

The paper introduces Debbie, a novel arguing chatbot that selects arguments from corpora and uses them contextually, advancing dialogue systems in argumentative settings.

Findings

Prototype of Debbie demonstrates basic argument selection capabilities.

Preliminary evaluation shows promise for contextually appropriate argument use.

Future work will enhance Debbie's argumentation skills.

Abstract

Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with companies switching to bot services for customer support, and new applications for users interested in casual conversation. One style of casual conversation is argument, many people love nothing more than a good argument. Moreover, there are a number of existing corpora of argumentative dialogues, annotated for agreement and disagreement, stance, sarcasm and argument quality. This paper introduces Debbie, a novel arguing bot, that selects arguments from conversational corpora, and aims to use them appropriately in context. We present an initial working prototype of Debbie, with some preliminary evaluation and describe future work.