Workshop Title and Overview

LCIC Workshop: "Legally Compliant Intelligent Chatbots – The Challenge of Persuasion and Manipulation"

With the growing deployment of intelligent chatbots and other conversational AI tools in diverse domains, understanding how to design systems that comply with ethical and legal standards is of paramount importance. Conversational systems often engage in persuasive interactions for beneficial purposes such as customer service, mental health support, and e-commerce. Thus, distinguishing legitimate persuasion from manipulative practices remains a significant challenge, particularly when applying computable methods to ensure compliance.

List of Topics

• Ethical, legal, and social frameworks distinguishing persuasion from manipulation in chatbot interactions.
• Models of persuasion in argumentation theory and formal argumentation.
• Computable methods for ensuring ethical persuasion (logic-based approaches, argumentative systems, machine learning, NLP, and LLM-based systems).
• Empirical studies analyzing chatbot-user interactions to identify and mitigate risks of manipulation.
• Case studies showcasing the deployment of legally compliant chatbots in domains such as e-commerce, data exchange, and healthcare.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full papers describing theoretical, technical, and empirical aspects of legally compliant chatbots, up to 15 pages.
• Short papers describing focused contributions, up to 8 pages.

Committees

Program Committee

• Leila Amgoud, University of Toulouse
• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool
• Gregory Bonnet, Caen University
• Roberta Calegari, University of Bologna
• Cristiano Castelfranchi, University Siena
• Giuseppe Contissa, University of Bologna, European University Institute
• Natali Helberger, University of Amsterdam
• Andreas Herzig, University of Toulouse
• Emiliano Lorini, University of Toulouse
• Hans Micklitz, European University Institute
• Henry Prakken, Utrecht University
• Antonino Rotolo, University of Bologna
• Stefan Sarkadi, King’s College London
• Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna, European University Institute
• Francesca Toni, Imperial College London

Organizing committee

• Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna, European University Institute
• Giuseppe Contissa, University of Bologna, European University Institute

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to: 

• Prof. Giovanni Sartor giovanni.sartor@unibo.it
• Prof. Giuseppe Contissa: giuseppe.contissa@unibo.it
• Dr. Paola Aurucci: paola.aurucci@unibo.it

Acknowledgement

The LCIC Workshop is sponsored by the H2020 European Research Council (ERC) Project "CompuLaw" under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement no. 833647).