Chatbots are conversational software applications designed to interact dialectically with users for a plethora of different purposes. Surprisingly, these colloquial agents have only recently been coupled with computational models of arguments (i.e. computational argumentation), whose aim is to formalise, in a machine-readable format, the ordinary exchange of information that characterises human communications. Chatbots may employ argumentation with different degrees and in a variety of manners. The present survey sifts through the literature to review papers concerning this kind of argumentation-based bot, drawing conclusions about the benefits and drawbacks that this approach entails in comparison with standard chatbots, while also envisaging possible future development and integration with the Transformer-based architecture and state-of-the-art Large Language models.

What Sassoon had heard were the early results of a curious project at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where Ducceschi was a researcher at the time. The Next Generation Sound Synthesis, or NESS, team had pulled together mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists to produce the most lifelike digital music ever created, by running hyper-realistic simulations of trumpets, guitars, violins, and more on a supercomputer. Sassoon, who works with both orchestral and digital music, "trying to smash the two together," was hooked. He became a resident composer with NESS, traveling back and forth between Milan and Edinburgh for the next few years. It was a steep learning curve.