Graduate School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (CPGEI) / Mechanical Engineering Department (DAMEC)

Threats make part of the set of rhetorical arguments, which are used in negotiation dialogues when a proponent agent tries to persuade his opponent to accept a proposal more readily. When more than one threat is generated, the proponent must evaluate each and select the most adequate. One way of evaluation is calculating the strength of threats, since a strong threat may quickly convince an opponent. The contribution of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we present a mechanism of generation of threats and, on the other hand, we propose a model for calculating the strength of threats, which is based on the goal processing inside the mental state of the opponent. We propose two ways for calculating the strength of threats depending on the kind of negotiation the agent is participating. The first proposal is to be used when the agent negotiates only with one opponent, and the second when the agent negotiates with more than one opponent.