Argument & Computation - Volume 9, issue 3

Authors: Afantenos, Stergos | Peldszus, Andreas | Stede, Manfred

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Parsing of argumentative structures has become a very active line of research in recent years. Like discourse parsing or any other natural language task that requires prediction of linguistic structures, most approaches choose to learn a local model and then perform global decoding over the local probability distributions, often imposing constraints that are specific to the task at hand. Specifically for argumentation parsing, two decoding approaches have been recently proposed: Minimum Spanning Trees (MST) and Integer Linear Programming (ILP), following similar trends in discourse parsing. In contrast to discourse parsing though, where trees are not always used as underlying annotation …schemes, argumentation structures so far have always been represented with trees. Using the ‘argumentative microtext corpus’ [in: Argumentation and Reasoned Action: Proceedings of the 1st European Conference on Argumentation, Lisbon 2015 / Vol. 2, College Publications, London, 2016 , pp. 801–815] as underlying data and replicating three different decoding mechanisms, in this paper we propose a novel ILP decoder and an extension to our earlier MST work, and then thoroughly compare the approaches. The result is that our new decoder outperforms related work in important respects, and that in general, ILP and MST yield very similar performance. Show more

Keywords: Argumentation structure, argument mining, parsing

DOI: 10.3233/AAC-180033

Citation: Argument & Computation, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 177-192, 2018

Authors: O’Halloran, Kieran

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This article models a software-based pedagogy, targetted at undergraduates, for assisting with detection and deconstruction of straw man arguments. The pedagogy is useful particularly where the student is unfamiliar with the standpoint attacked in the argument, where the text describing the standpoint is large and where the argument is lengthy too. I use a digital text analysis tool – Sketch Engine – to help reveal and deconstruct a straw man argument which misrepresents one specific aspect of a book. I then go on to use this tool in combination with another digital text analysis tool – WMatrix – to …demonstrate too how the book’s wider standpoints conflict with the argument’s framing. I thus also show the argument to be a much bigger straw man, what I refer to as a wicker man . Advantages of using the digital tools are that (i) they efficiently set the student up to judge whether or not central topics in a large text being attacked are relevant absences from the argument attacking that text; (ii) the potential for arbitrariness in judging whether or not the argument is a straw man or a wicker man is significantly reduced, making in principle for scrupulous evaluation. Show more

Keywords: Argumentation and pedagogy, argumentation and corpus linguistics, software-aided argument analysis, straw man arguments, Sketch Engine software, WMatrix software

DOI: 10.3233/AAC-180040

Citation: Argument & Computation, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 193-222, 2018

Authors: Doutre, Sylvie | Mailly, Jean-Guy

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This paper addresses the issue of the dynamic enforcement of a constraint in an argumentation system. The system consists in (1) an argumentation framework, made up, notably, of a set of arguments and of an attack relation, (2) an evaluation semantics, and (3) the evaluation result, computed from (1) and (2). An agent may want another agent to consider a new attack, or to have a given argument accepted, or even to relax the definition of the semantics. A constraint on any of the three components is thus defined, and it has to be enforced in the system. The enforcement …may result in changes on components of the system. The paper surveys existing approaches for the dynamic enforcement of a constraint and its consequences, and reveals challenging enforcement cases that remain to be investigated. Show more

Keywords: Knowledge representation and reasoning, abstract argumentation, change, revision, update

DOI: 10.3233/AAC-180425

Citation: Argument & Computation, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 223-248, 2018

Authors: Dung, Phan Minh | Thang, Phan Minh

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Abstract dialectical frameworks have been proposed as a generalization of the abstract argumentation frameworks. The semantics of abstract dialectical frameworks is defined by identifying different classes of models. In this paper, we show that the semantics of abstract dialectical frameworks could naturally be defined based on simple notions of arguments and attacks like in abstract argumentation. This insight allows us to adapt directly the semantical concepts in abstract argumentation to abstract dialectical frameworks that not only capture the standard semantics of abstract dialectical frameworks, but also suggest other new semantics based on the idea of “rejection as assumption” (raa) (similar …to the concept of “negation as assumption” in assumption-based argumentation and logic programming) like the well-founded semantics or the raa-preferential semantics. Show more

Keywords: Abstract argumentation, abstract dialectical frameworks

DOI: 10.3233/AAC-180427

Citation: Argument & Computation, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 249-267, 2018