  Recent work in human-computer interaction has explored the use of
conversational agents as facilitators for group goal-oriented discussions.
Inspired by this work and by the apparent lack of tooling available to support
it, we created Diplomat, a Python-based framework for building conversational
agent facilitators. Diplomat is designed to support simple specification of
agent functionality as well as customizable integration with online chat
services. We document a preliminary user study we conducted to help inform the
design of Diplomat. We also describe the architecture, capabilities, and
limitations of our tool, which we have shared on GitHub.

Human-Computer Interaction