On the calculation of the strength of threats

摘要

Threats are used in persuasive negotiation dialogues when a proponent agent tries to persuade an opponent of him to accept a proposal. Depending on the information the proponent has modeled about his opponent(s), he may generate more than one threat, in which case he has to evaluate them in order to select the most adequate to be sent. One way to evaluate the generated threats is by calculating their strengths, i.e., the persuasive force of each threat. Related work considers mainly two criteria to do such evaluation: the certainty level of the beliefs that compose the threat and the importance of the goal of the opponent. This article aims to study the components of threats and propose further criteria that lead to improve their evaluation and to select more effective threats during the dialogue. Thus, the contribution of this paper is a model for calculating the strength of threats that is mainly based on the status of the goal of the opponent and the credibility of the proponent. The model is empirically evaluated and the results demonstrate that the proposed model is more efficient than previous works in terms of the number of exchanged arguments, and the number of reached agreements.