Decision Conversations Decoded     

Decision Conversations Decoded - overview

Decision Conversations Decoded*

 

The purpose of our project is to help people when they make a decision collaboratively, i.e., involving more than one person.

Many decisions in our lives we cannot make alone. Sometimes we have to work with our family, friends, colleagues, or professionals to find the best option. And it is no secret that these collaborative discussions can be inefficient, disorganized and lead to decisions that leave everyone frustrated.

One challenge with collaborative decision discussions is that we get lost in the exchanges. We cannot both participate to the conversation and keep carefully track of which alternatives were proposed, by whom, when, what criteria were brought forward, how do they relate to the options proposed, who brought up the criteria, who thought it was important and so on.

The objective of our project is ti build a system and a set of algorithms that can do decision-oriented note taking and support us during our decision conversations, reminding us of where we are, and after those conversations, when we need to reflect on what has been discussed, sometimes to reach a final decision.

We are in the process of develpoing such system and algorithms. The core of the technology lies in the information extraction algorithms needed to identify the relevant elements(alternative, criteria, decision topic). In addition we are interested in detecting assent and groiup agreement along with targeted sentiment of speakers towards each element. 

 

*We sometime refer to the system informally as DECODE for short.