[TMP-041] Ethical chatbots

Contact person: Bettina Fazzinga, Andrea Galassi (bettina.fazzinga@unical.it ; a.galassi@unibo.it) 

Internal Partners:

1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Bettina Fazzinga
2. Università di Bologna (UNIBO), Paolo Torroni 

 

Building AI machines capable of making decisions compliant with ethical principles is a challenge that needs to be faced in the direction of improving reliability and fairness in AI.

This micro-project aims at combining argument mining and argumentation-based reasoning to ensure ethical behaviors in the context of chatbot systems. Argumentation is a powerful tool for modeling conversations and disputes. Argument mining is the automatic extraction of arguments from natural language inputs, which could be applied both in the analysis of user input and in the retrieval of suitable feedbacks to the user. We aim to augment classical argumentation frameworks with ethical and/or moral constraints and with natural language interaction capabilities, in order to guide the conversation between chatbots and humans in accordance with the ethical constraints.

Results Summary

We propose a general-purpose dialogue system architecture that leverages computational argumentation and state-of-the-art language technologies to implement ethics by design.

In particular, we propose a chatbot architecture that relies on transparent and verifiable methods and is conceived so as to respect relevant data protection regulations. Importantly, the chatbot is able to explain its outputs or recommendations in a manner adapted to the intended (human) user.

We evaluate our proposal against a covid-19 vaccine case study.

Tangible Outcomes

1. Fazzinga, Bettina, Andrea Galassi, and Paolo Torroni. “An argumentative dialogue system for COVID-19 vaccine information.” In International Conference on Logic and Argumentation, pp. 477-485. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-89391-0_27 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12079
2. Video presentation summarizing the project