Persuasive Natural Language Generation -- A Literature Review

The movie'The Social Dilemma' by Jeff Orlowski (2020) explores the rise of social media and the damage it has caused to society. With a rather negative connotation, the directors address the topic of digital platforms and how their users are influenced and persuaded in surveillance capitalism (Economist 2019). Persuasion is an activity that involves one party, the persuader, trying to induce another party, the persuadee, to believe or disbelieve something or to do something (Iyer & Sycara 2019). The Economist (2019) claims that as a central tenet of surveillance capitalism, and persuasion is, furthermore, important in many aspects of daily life. Consider, for example, an employee demanding an increase in compensation, a physician trying to get a patient to enter a slimming programme, a charity volunteer trying to raise funds for a school project (Hunter et al. 2019), or a government advisor trying to get people to take a vaccination in the midst of a pandemic for the greater good. A persuasive Natural Language Generation (NLG) artificial intelligence (AI) is a system that can create communications aimed at a user (the persuadee) in order to persuade her to accept a specific argument through persuasive messages.