Computer-mediated collaborative decision making: theoretical and implementation issues

The development of systems for computer-mediated collaborative decision making (CDM) is attracting increasing interest in various research areas. Although some approaches provide a cognitive argumentation environment and methods to structure the related discussions, they lack consensus-seeking and decision-making capabilities. In addition, the majority of them are not based on a well-defined set of users´ communicative actions. Reporting on HERMES, a fully implemented Web-based system that enhances group decision making by providing an argumentation framework to the agents involved, this paper discusses theoretical and implementation aspects of an advanced group decision support system. Argumentation in our framework is performed through a set of discourse acts, especially defined for the CDM context, following an artificial intelligence perspective. The proposed system provides the appropriate machinery for automating processes such as discussion structure, consistency checking and reasoning for decision making. Moreover, it includes further assistance modules for information retrieval, natural language processing and argument-building features.