Biased bots: Conversational agents to overcome polarization

Abstract

© Copyright held by the owner/author(s). In today's media landscape, emotionally charged topics including issues related to politics, religion, or gender can lead to the formation of filter bubbles, echo chambers, and subsequently to strong polarization. An effective way to help people break out of their bubble is engaging with other perspectives. When caught in a filter bubble, however, it can be hard to find an opposed conversation partner in one's social surroundings to discuss a particular topic with. Also, such conversations can be socially awkward and are, therefore, rather avoided. In this project, we aim to train different chat-bots to become highly opinionated on specific topics (e...