Diplomat: A conversational agent framework for goal-oriented group discussion

Abstract

Recent work in human-computer interaction has explored the use of conversational agents as facilitators for group goal-oriented discussions. Inspired by this work and by the apparent lack of tooling available to support it, we created Diplomat, a Python-based framework for building conversational agent facilitators. Diplomat is designed to support simple specification of agent functionality as well as customizable integration with online chat services. We document a preliminary user study we conducted to help inform the design of Diplomat. We also describe the architecture, capabilities, and limitations of our tool, which we have shared on GitHub.