The group has been working on some tools that help with the analysis of argument, but that have a very low barrier to use. The first result is OVA (Online Visualisation of Argument) which is an online Flash tool for analysing arguments in web pages. In some ways it is similar to Araucaria, though it is not as sophisticated. It can also generate AIF analyses, and can save them to ArgDB. Both AIF and ArgDB form cornerstones of the the EPSRC-funded project Dialectical Argumentation Machines which aims to build the infrastructure required for the World Wide Argument Web.
OVA’s home page is here, and an alpha version of OVA is available for general use at http://ova.computing.dundee.ac.uk. We are keen to hear your feedback: please do contact Chris, Simon or Mark.
Here is a short film [ Download: xvid avi format (26.2MB) ] of Colin Gourlay talking about his honours project at the School of Computing 09 degree show. Colin has been working in the ARG group on the argument blogging project which captures argumentative dialogues that occur online and records them using the Argument Interchange Format. Simon will be presenting a paper describing some of the work on this project during CMNA 9 at IJCAI in July.
COMMA, next week in Toulouse, is the largest gathering of computational folks interested in argumentation. The ARG Dundee group have two papers there, both involving the emerging Argument Interchange Format. The first deals with the link between AIF and argument visualisation, and the second with how dialogue can be richly represented with only very minor extensions to the initial AIF specification. We will also be showing an early alpha of Araucaria 4.0 which uses the AIF. It will be available for download after the conference.
In collaboration with a team at Leuven university, the Araucaria corpus is starting to be used to explore the problems of automatic argument analysis, in the context of their ACILA project. A short paper describing some initial results has just been accepted to ICAIL-2007 in Stanford.
The current bibliographic data is:
Moens, M.-F., Boiy, E., Palau, R.M., & Reed, C. (2007, to appear) “Automatic Detection of Arguments in Legal Texts” in Proceedings of the International Conference on AI & Law (ICAIL-2007), Stanford, CA, ACM Press.
Analyses of argumentation schemes developed in the group here have been adapted for use in Compendium, a popular discussion mapping tool. This is a nice example of the sort of re-use that XML (and Araucaria’s AML) allows, and that the AIF is designed to simplify. There are more details at the Compendium site.
ArgDF is a framework for semantic web based argumentation using RDF. The project is based at the British University in Dubai and runs jointly with the University of Edinburgh, Informatics Department, and the University of Dundee, School of Computing. The project homepage can be found at www.ArgDF.org which links to the Dubai repository and Dundee repository. The Dundee repository is live today.