Explanation & Argumentation
Formal Analysis of Dialogues on Infinite Argumentation Frameworks
Belardinelli, Francesco (Université d'Evry) | Grossi, Davide (University of Liverpool) | Maudet, Nicolas (Sorbonne Universités, UPMC University of Paris 06, CNRS, UMR 7606, LIP6)
The paper analyses multi-agent strategic dialogues on possibly infinite argumentation frameworks. We develop a formal model for representing such dialogues, and introduce FO A -ATL, a first-order extension of alternating-time logic, for expressing the interplay of strategic and argumentation-theoretic properties. This setting is investigated with respect to the model checking problem, by means of a suitable notion of bisimulation. This notion of bisimulation is also used to shed light on how static properties of argumentation frameworks influence their dynamic behaviour.
Context-Independent Claim Detection for Argument Mining
Lippi, Marco (University of Bologna) | Torroni, Paolo (University of Bologna)
Argumentation mining aims to automatically identify structured argument data from unstructured natural language text. This challenging, multi-faceted task is recently gaining a growing attention, especially due to its many potential applications. One particularly important aspect of argumentation mining is claim identification. Most of the current approaches are engineered to address specific domains. However, argumentative sentences are often characterized by common rhetorical structures, independently of the domain. We thus propose a method that exploits structured parsing information to detect claims without resorting to contextual information, and yet achieve a performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art methods that heavily rely on the context.
Emotions in Argumentation: an Empirical Evaluation
Benlamine, Sahbi (University of Montreal) | Chaouachi, Maher (University of Montreal) | Villata, Serena (INRIA Sophia Antipolis) | Cabrio, Elena (INRIA Sophia Antipolis) | Frasson, Claude (University of Montreal) | Gandon, Fabien (INRIA Sophia Antipolis)
However, humans are proved to question: What is the connection between the arguments proposed behave differently, mixing rational and emotional by the participants of a debate and their emotional attitudes to guide their actions, and it has been status? Such question breaks down into the following subquestions: claimed that there exists a strong connection between (1) is the polarity of arguments and the relations the argumentation process and the emotions among them correlated with the polarity of the detected emotions?, felt by people involved in such process. In this paper, and (2) what is the relation between the kind and the we assess this claim by means of an experiment: amount of arguments proposed in a debate, and the mental during several debates people's argumentation engagement detected among the participants of the debate? in plain English is connected and compared to the emotions automatically detected from the participants. To answer these questions, we propose an empirical evaluation Our results show a correspondence between of the connection between argumentation and emotions.
Attacker and Defender Counting Approach for Abstract Argumentation
Pu, Fuan, Luo, Jian, Zhang, Yulai, Luo, Guiming
In Dung's abstract argumentation, arguments are either acceptable or unacceptable, given a chosen notion of acceptability. This gives a coarse way to compare arguments. In this paper, we propose a counting approach for a more fine-gained assessment to arguments by counting the number of their respective attackers and defenders based on argument graph and argument game. An argument is more acceptable if the proponent puts forward more number of defenders for it and the opponent puts forward less number of attackers against it. We show that our counting model has two well-behaved properties: normalization and convergence. Then, we define a counting semantics based on this model, and investigate some general properties of the semantics.
STAR: A System of Argumentation for Story Comprehension and Beyond
Diakidoy, Irene-Anna (University of Cyprus) | Kakas, Antonis (University of Cyprus) | Michael, Loizos (Open University of Cyprus) | Miller, Rob (University College London)
This paper presents the STAR system, a system for automated narrative comprehension, developed on top of an argumentation-theoretic formulation of defeasible reasoning, and strongly following guidelines from the psychology of comprehension. We discuss the system's use in psychological experiments on story comprehension, and our plans for its broader use in empirical studies concerning wider issues of commonsense reasoning.
Exploiting Parallelism for Hard Problems in Abstract Argumentation
Cerutti, Federico (University of Aberdeen) | Tachmazidis, Ilias (University of Huddersfield) | Vallati, Mauro (University of Huddersfield) | Batsakis, Sotirios (University of Huddersfield) | Giacomin, Massimiliano (University of Brescia) | Antoniou, Grigoris (University of Huddersfield)
Abstract argumentation framework ( AF ) is a unifying framework able to encompass a variety of nonmonotonic reasoning approaches, logic programming and computational argumentation. Yet, efficient approaches for most of the decision and enumeration problems associated to AF s are missing, thus limiting the efficacy of argumentation-based approaches in real domains. In this paper, we present an algorithm for enumerating the preferred extensions of abstract argumentation frameworks which exploits parallel computation. To this purpose, the SCC-recursive semantics definition schema is adopted, where extensions are defined at the level of specific sub-frameworks. The algorithm shows significant performance improvements in large frameworks, in terms of number of solutions found and speedup.
Explaining Answer Set Programming in Argumentative Terms
Schulz, Claudia (Imperial College London)
Argumentation Theory and Answer Set Programming (ASP) are two prominent theories in the field of knowledge representation and non-monotonic reasoning,where Argumentation Theory stands for a variety of approaches following similar ideas.The main difference between Argumentation Theory and ASP is that the former focusses on representing knowledge and reasoning about it in a way that resembles human reasoning, neglecting the efficiency of the reasoning procedure,whereas the latter is concerned with the efficient computation of solutions to a reasoning problem, resulting in a less human-understandable process. In recent years, ASP has been frequently applied for the computation of reasoning problems represented in argumentation-theoretical-terms and has been found an efficient method for determining solutions to problems in Argumentation Theory. My research is concerned with the opposite direction, i.e. with applying Argumentation Theory to ASP in order to explain the solutions to an ASP reasoning problem in a more human-understandable way.Developing such an explanation method also involves to investigate both the exact relationship between different approaches in Argumentation Theory in order to find the most suitable one for explanations and their connection with ASP, in particular with respect to their semantics.
Graphical Representation of Assumption-Based Argumentation
Schulz, Claudia (Imperial College London)
Since Assumption-Based Argumentation (ABA) was introduced in the nineties,the structure and semantics of an ABA framework have been studied exclusively in logical termswithout any graphical representation.Here, we show how an ABA framework and its complete semantics can be displayed in a graph,clarifying the structure of the ABA framework as well as the resulting complete assumption labellings.Furthermore, we show that such an ABA graph can be used to represent the structureand semantics of a logic program (LP), based on the correspondence between the semantics of a LP and an ABA framework encoding this LP.
On Computing Explanations in Argumentation
Fan, Xiuyi (Imperial College London) | Toni, Francesca (Imperial College London)
Argumentation can be viewed as a process of generating explanations. However, existing argumentation semantics are developed for identifying acceptable arguments within a set, rather than giving concrete justifications for them. In this work, we propose a new argumentation semantics, related admissibility, designed for giving explanations to arguments in both Abstract Argumentation and Assumption-based Argumentation. We identify different types of explanations defined in terms of the new semantics. We also give a correct computational counterpart for explanations using dispute forests.
Providing Arguments in Discussions Based on the Prediction of Human Argumentative Behavior
Rosenfeld, Ariel (Bar-Ilan University) | Kraus, Sarit ( Bar-Ilan University )
Argumentative discussion is a highly demanding task. In order to help people in such situations, this paper provides an innovative methodology for developing an agent that can support people in argumentative discussions by proposing possible arguments to them. By analyzing more than 130 human discussions and 140 questionnaires, answered by people, we show that the well-established Argumentation Theory is not a good predictor of people's choice of arguments. Then, we present a model that has 76% accuracy when predicting people’s top three argument choices given a partial deliberation. We present the Predictive and Relevance based Heuristic agent (PRH), which uses this model with a heuristic that estimates the relevance of possible arguments to the last argument given in order to propose possible arguments. Through extensive human studies with over 200 human subjects, we show that people’s satisfaction from the PRH agent is significantly higher than from other agents that propose arguments based on Argumentation Theory, predict arguments without the heuristics or only the heuristics. People also use the PRH agent's proposed arguments significantly more often than those proposed by the other agents.