Exploring the Mobile Usability of Argumentative Dialogue Systems for Opinion Building

Annalena Aicher, Stefan Hillmann, Sebastian Möller, Wolfgang Minker, Stefan Ultes

Abstract: Nowadays speech-driven interfaces such as mobile digital assistants and chatbots can support collaborative information seeking and are becoming increasingly commonplace. Especially, mobile dialogue assistants offer innovative approaches to deliver and access information and thus, display a promising approach to assist humans in their opinion building process. Still, due to the complexity of argumentative tasks mobile argumentative speech interfaces are still very scarce. Hence, the effect of such interfaces on a user’s opinion building process is quite unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the influence of such interfaces on the interest and opinion building process of users. Both categories Therefore we introduce two (I/O) modalities (menu/speech) of the argumentative dialog system (ADS) BEA (“Building Engaging Argumentation” [2]) which enables the user to scrutinize arguments on both sides of a controversial topic. In particular, we reflect on the influence and advantages of a spoken hands-free versus a clickable drop-down menu-based ADS with regard to “mobile” dialog systems use cases. Therefore the users’ expectations and experiences in a self-assessment questionnaire are evaluated and discussed in comparison to our user interest and opinion model.