Threats are used in persuasive negotiation dialogues when a proponent agent tries to persuade an opponent of him to accept a proposal. Depending on the information the proponent has modeled about his opponent(s), he may generate more than one threat, in which case he has to evaluate them in order to select the most adequate to be sent. One way to evaluate the generated threats is by calculating their strengths, i.e., the persuasive force of each threat. Related work considers mainly two criteria to do such evaluation: the certainty level of the beliefs that compose the threat and the importance of the goal of the opponent. This article aims to study the components of threats and propose further criteria that lead to improve their evaluation and to select more effective threats during the dialogue. Thus, the contribution of this paper is a model for calculating the strength of threats that is mainly based on the status of the goal of the opponent and the credibility of the proponent. The model is empirically evaluated and the results demonstrate that the proposed model is more efficient than previous works in terms of the number of exchanged arguments, and the number of reached agreements.

中文翻译：

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关于威胁强度的计算

当说服力的特工试图说服对手反对者接受提议时，在有说服力的谈判对话中会使用威胁。根据支持者为对手建模的信息，他可能会产生多个威胁，在这种情况下，他必须对威胁进行评估以选择最适合发送的威胁。评估所生成威胁的一种方法是计算其强度，即每种威胁的说服力。相关工作主要考虑进行评估的两个标准：构成威胁的信念的确定性水平和对手目标的重要性。本文旨在研究威胁的组成部分，并提出进一步的标准，以提高对威胁的评估并在对话中选择更有效的威胁。从而，本文的贡献是一个计算威胁强度的模型，该模型主要基于对手目标的状态和支持者的信誉。对模型进行了经验评估，结果表明，所提出的模型在交换参数的数量和达成协议的数量方面比以前的工作更有效。