Generare messaggi persuasivi per una dieta salutare
Authors: Alessandro Mazzei (Università di Torino, 2015)
Topic: Chatbots and Dialogue Systems

Abstract
In this work we consider the possibility of automatically generating persuasive messages for users to follow a healthy diet. After describing a simple architecture for generating template-based messages, we consider the relationship between message design and some persuasion theories.

Introduction
MADIMAN (Multimedia Application for DIet Management) is a project that explores the possibility of applying artificial intelligence in the context of diet. The design idea is to create a virtual dietist that helps people to follow a healthy diet. Using the ubiquity of mobile devices you want to build an artificial intelligence system that allows (1) to recover, analyze, preserve the nutritional values of a specific recipe, (2) to control its compatibility with the diet that you are following and (3) to persuade the user to make the best choice compared to this diet. In the hypothetical application scenario, the interaction between man and food is mediated by an artificial system that, based on various factors, encourages or discourages the user to eat a specific dish. The factors that the system should consider are: the diet that you intend to follow, the food that has been eaten in the previous days, the nutritional values of the specific dish that you want to choose. The application architecture that the project wants to realize is a web services system (Fig. 1) that interacts with the user through an APP (Fig. 1-1.), analyze the contents of a specific recipe by means of an information retrieved form (Fig. 01-3.), reasons by means of an automatic reasoning module (Fig. 01-4.) and, on the basis of the reasoning, generate a persuasive message to convince the user to make the best choice using an automatic natural language generation module (NLG, Fig. This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. The automatic treatment of the language comes into play in the analysis phase of the AUTHOR recipe, as well as in the generation of the persuasive message. In particular, the message generation system must use the reasoning output as input. At the present state of development of the project, the reasoner is a system based on the theory of Simple Temporary Problems, which produces a constant (I1, I2, C1, C2, C3. I: incompatible, C: compatible) together with a simple explanation of the result (IPO vs. IPER) AUTHOR. For example, at the end of the argument, a dish may be incompatible with a diet because it has too low protein values (I1+IPO) or too high (I1+IPER); or a dish may be compatible although hyper-protein (C2+IPER) but, if chosen, it will have to be balanced by choosing in the future hypo-protein dishes. The present work is structured as follows: in the sec section::nlg will describe the language generation module, in the sec section::persuasion will review some theories of persuasion that inspired the design of the generation module, while in the sec section::conclusion will conclude the work with some considerations on the state of the project and future developments.

Conclusion
In this work we have described the main characteristics of a system of generating messages with persuasive intents in the context of diet. Currently, in order to be able to quantitatively verify the goodness of the proposed approach, we plan to follow two separate experimental methods. Initially, we are running a simulation that takes into account the various factors that affect the success of our system. On the one hand, it is necessary to shape the user's propensity to be persuaded, on the other hand, it is necessary to consider sensible numerical values to shape the diet and the dishes. If the simulation gives promising results, then we intend to evaluate the system in a realistic medical trial. Following the evaluation model proposed by Reiter for the STOP system (Reiter et al., 2003), we intend to test the system through control groups in a specific medical context, namely that of clinics to treat essential obesity.