Debbie, the Debate Bot of the Future
Table 1: Average response times in seconds
['[BOLD] topic', '[BOLD] stance', '[BOLD] baseline', '[BOLD] cluster', '[BOLD] graph']
We arrived at these by testing for three sentences per stance per topic, each deliberately chosen such that they would access different clusters. As expected, both the cluster and the cluster graph methods perform faster than the baseline. The cluster graph method is faster than using just clusters in most cases. The exception was the ”for” case of death penalty, which, we believe, can be attributed to the significantly larger size of the cluster that is accessed by the cluster graph, triggering a greater number of computations. Given that our database only has high quality arguments, the appropriateness of Debbie’s responses are primarily dependent on the performance of the similarity algorithm. However, exchange of only high quality arguments between the system and the user, with minimal repetition (none from Debbie) hampers the natural flow of the conversation.