An Implementation of An Automated Facilitation Agent Promoting Inclusive Discussion

Abstract

The application of automated facilitators in the issue-based information system (IBIS) has been proven sufficiently practical in the past few years, especially for guiding users to solve particular problems. However, since the original automated facilitator was designed to only respond to users’ existing speech to promote other users’ opinions, two classic situations, such as discussions are not sufficient because the participants are not familiar with each other and some dominant participants would lead the discussion into a meta one, often occurred in the past scenarios. The discussions that include phenomenons mentioned above are defined as non-inclusive discussions because not all participants could express themselves sufficiently enough. Therefore, the functions of ice-breaking and promoting the discussion based on different phases are necessary to create and reinforce an open, positive and participative environment for inclusive discussion, to further promote more opinions and to make discussions satisfying. As the result, the design, implementation and results of how automated facilitators promote discussions more properly with the functions mentioned above are demonstrated in this paper. Based on the design right now, the further combination with IBIS label classification and the algorithm for measuring discussion progress will be implemented.