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<Paper uid="W98-1416">
  <Title>ATTENTION DURING ARGUMENT GENERATION AND PRESENTATION*</Title>
  <Section position="10" start_page="154" end_page="156" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> NAG uses items in the user's focus of attention to guide a series of generation-analysis cycles which result in the generation of an Argument Graph that is both normatively acceptable and persuasive. Attentional focus also supports the generation of enthymematic arguments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> NAG was written in Common Lisp. It was tested on five sample scenarios with KBs containing up to 200 propositions. The simulation of attention Via spreading activation generally led to a significant speed-up in content planning times, with little effect on the generated arguments \[Zukerman et al., 1998\]. Content planning times slowed down when extremely slow decay factors and low activation thresholds were used 3An alternative approach t O combining probabilistic pruning and semantic suppression is described in \[McConachy et aL, 1998\].</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> and when extremely fast decay factors and high activation thresholds were used. The former incorporated into the Argument Graph nodes that were only marginally related to the goal, while the latter incorporated too few nodes, resulting in essentially a goal-based search for an argument.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We conducted a preliminary Web-based evaluation of NAG's content planning component. This evaluation consisted of giving respondents pre-test questions regarding certain propositions in an asteroid argument similar to that discussed in this paper, and then presenting them with hand-generated renditions of an asteroid argument which took into account the responses to these questions. A post-test was used to determine the effect of the argument. This test showed a clear tendency among the respondents to shift belief towards the targets as a result of NAG's argument. A more rigorous evaluation of the content planning component and an evaluation of the argument presentation component will be performed in the next months.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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