Abstract
This paper describes an investigation into the effectiveness of ArguMessage, a system that uses argumentation schemes and limited user input to semi-automatically generate persuasive messages encouraging behaviour change that follow specific argumentation patterns. We conducted user studies in the domains of healthy eating and email security to investigate its effectiveness. Our results show that ArguMessage in general supported users in generating messages based on the argumentation schemes. However, there were some issues in particular with copying the example messages, and some system improvements need to be made. Participants were generally satisfied with the messages produced, with the exception of those produced by two schemes (‘Argument from memory with goal’ and ‘Argument from values with goal’) which were removed after the first study.
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Notes
- 1.
A study was conducted to group messages into the six principles with over 150 participants and the measure used for effective validation of their messages was the Free-Marginal Kappa [13].
- 2.
Argument schemes are commonly used defeasible patterns of reasoning, for example arguing that something is the case because an expert stated so.
- 3.
These were approved after post-processing, and the system changed (as explained below) to do this automatically in future.
- 4.
For example, converting capital letters to lower case, removing additional full-stops, and converting 2nd and 3rd person usage to 1st person usage.
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Acknowledgements
The work on cyber-security in this paper was supported by EPSRC award EP/P011829/1.
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J. Thomas, R., Masthoff, J., Oren, N. (2019). Is ArguMessage Effective? A Critical Evaluation of the Persuasive Message Generation System. In: Oinas-Kukkonen, H., Win, K., Karapanos, E., Karppinen, P., Kyza, E. (eds) Persuasive Technology: Development of Persuasive and Behavior Change Support Systems. PERSUASIVE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11433. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17287-9_8
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