his paper focuses on the issue of premissary relevance, as a challenge faced in health promotion interventions. To promote attitude change and influence health behavior change, it is crucial that we use premises that are relevant on an individual level. Relevance in argumentation refers to both the fact that the premises have to do with the standpoint at issue and the fact that our interlocutors will accept them. We claim that autonomous argumentation systems hold the promise to enable proper argumentative exchanges that capture and addresses what matters to individuals. To do so, however, there is a need to better consider and operationalise theories of argumentation that enable a reconstruction of the different stages of argumentation. The theory of argumentation known as pragma-dialectics can offer a promising basis for the architecture of autonomous health promotion advisors.

In this contribution, it is suggested that argumentation theories may offer the tools to do so. More specifically, the pragmadialectical theory of argumentation (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992; 2004) is proposed as a solid instrument for analyzing and evaluating argumentation in consultation, as it not only provides a set of reasonableness criteria for argumentative conduct but also can account for arguers' need to effectively tailor argumentative messages to their recipients. The instrumental value of pragma-dialectics in the field of automated argument selection will be elucidated by means of a case study concerning antibiotics. In doing so, this contribution is closely connected to the paper by Rubinelli, Wierda, Labrie, and O'Keefe (AAAI Spring Symposium 2011) and provides an exploratory investigation of the advantages of a pragma-dialectical approach to the conceptual design of automated health communication systems and autonomous health promotion.