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.

The act of persuasion, a key component in rhetoric argumentation, may be viewed as a dynamics modifier. We extend Dung's frameworks with acts of persuasion among agents, and consider interactions among attack, persuasion and defence that have been largely unheeded so far. We characterise basic notions of admissibilities in this framework, and show a way of enriching them through, effectively, CTL (computation tree logic) encoding, which also permits importation of the theoretical results known to the logic into our argumentation frameworks. Our aim is to complement the growing interest in coordination of static and dynamic argumentation.

This paper describes the development of a corpus of blog posts that are annotated for the presence of attempts to persuade and corresponding tactics employed in persuasive messages. We investigate the feasibility of classifying blog posts as persuasive or non-persuasive on the basis of lexical features in the text and the tactics (as provided by human annotators). Annotated tactics provide substantial assistance in classifying persuasion, particularly tactics indicating formal reasoning, deontic obligation, and discussions of possible outcomes, suggesting that learning to identify tactics may be an excellent first step to detecting attempts to persuade.