How Different, or Different How? Stance Granularity in Viewpoint Selection for Dialog Systems that Engage Users with Alternative Views

Overview & Synopsis

Systems that aim to help a user engage with viewpoints other than their own have to decide how different those viewpoints should be. Viewpoints are mainly represented on a scalar scale, too coarse to distinguish viewpoints that disagree with the user about different things. We introduce a selection policy in which a bandit sets how far viewpoints may sit from the user, and the policy selects the most novel viewpoint within that bound. We vary only its stance encoder, comparing a scalar score with Perspectivized Stance Vectors, which break a position into separate stances on concepts. We integrate it inside a dialog system and run a between-subjects study (N=63). Concept-level stance produces more varied exposure sequences and broader coverage of the topic's positions, but does not change how deeply users justify viewpoints or how accurately they reconstruct them. Finally, we analyze user--viewpoint relations at the concept level, showing that users reconstruct a viewpoint least accurately on concepts that one side took no position on, rather than on concepts where the two disagreed. Our findings open up opportunities for dialog systems that support engagement with alternative viewpoints by acting on which concepts a user and a viewpoint disagree on, rather than on distance alone.