AUTHOR=Castagna Federico , Garton Alexandra , McBurney Peter , Parsons Simon , Sassoon Isabel , Sklar Elizabeth I. TITLE=EQRbot: A chatbot delivering EQR argument-based explanations JOURNAL=Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence VOLUME=6 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2023.1045614 DOI=10.3389/frai.2023.1045614 ISSN=2624-8212 ABSTRACT=

Recent years have witnessed the rise of several new argumentation-based support systems, especially in the healthcare industry. In the medical sector, it is imperative that the exchange of information occurs in a clear and accurate way, and this has to be reflected in any employed virtual systems. Argument Schemes and their critical questions represent well-suited formal tools for modeling such information and exchanges since they provide detailed templates for explanations to be delivered. This paper details the EQR argument scheme and deploys it to generate explanations for patients' treatment advice using a chatbot (EQRbot). The EQR scheme (devised as a pattern of Explanation-Question-Response interactions between agents) comprises multiple premises that can be interrogated to disclose additional data. The resulting explanations, obtained as instances of the employed argumentation reasoning engine and the EQR template, will then feed the conversational agent that will exhaustively convey the requested information and answers to follow-on users' queries as personalized Telegram messages. Comparisons with a previous baseline and existing argumentation-based chatbots illustrate the improvements yielded by EQRbot against similar conversational agents.