Diplomat: A conversational agent framework for goal-oriented group discussion

TL;DR

Diplomat is a Python framework designed to facilitate the development of conversational agents that assist in goal-oriented group discussions, supporting easy customization and online chat integration.

Contribution

This work introduces Diplomat, a novel framework that simplifies building and customizing conversational agents for group discussions, filling a gap in available tooling.

Findings

Preliminary user study informed design choices.

Framework supports easy specification and online chat integration.

Shared on GitHub for community use.

Abstract

Recent work in human-computer interaction has explored the use of conversational agents as facilitators for group goal-oriented discussions. Inspired by this work and by the apparent lack of tooling available to support it, we created Diplomat, a Python-based framework for building conversational agent facilitators. Diplomat is designed to support simple specification of agent functionality as well as customizable integration with online chat services. We document a preliminary user study we conducted to help inform the design of Diplomat. We also describe the architecture, capabilities, and limitations of our tool, which we have shared on GitHub.