Intelligent facilitation agent for online web-based group discussion system

Abstract

Facilitation is considered one of the most important factors in the effective use of group decision support system (GDSS). However, high quality human facilitator may not be easily available. Furthermore, increase in globalization and telecommuting requires GDSS that supports dispersed group meeting, which is not conveniently implemented with human facilitators. This paper proposes an intelligent facilitation agent (IFA) that can be applied to facilitate group meeting through an online web-based discussion system. The IFA employs the power of asking questions, based on the supporting decision model associated with the problem being discussed, to structure group conversation. The experiments were set to study the effects of our IFA on group meeting through an online discussion system. The experimental results illustrate that group meetings with our IFA have higher number of generated ideas, higher discussion participation, higher amount of supporting information for decision making, and lower group distraction.