Recognizing Intent and Trust of a Facebook Friend to Facilitate Autonomous Conversation

We built a conversational agent performing social promotion (CASP) to assist in automation of interacting with Facebook friends. CASP relies on a domain-independent natural language relevance technique which filters web mining results to support a conversation with friends and other network members. In this study we focus on recognizing friends’ intents to better support automated conversation with them. We learn the plausible sequences of communicative actions and mental states as they are expressed in text to support plausible dialogue. We evaluate the relevance of the constructed conversations with respect to suitability of topicality and communicative actions, measuring how human users loose trust in the system. It is confirmed that maintaining a plausible sequences of communicative actions in automated postings is important for retaining trust of human peers and efficient social promotion by means of CASP.