Simon gave a presentation on the Argument Blogging project to CMNA 9 held at IJCAI in Pasadena recently. As described in a previous post argument blogging is the process of harvesting textual resources from the WWW and structuring them in terms of argumentative dialogues. The aim is to support distributed dialogues occuring online and to capture those interactions in a form that can be reused.
Abstract: “Argument Blogging is the process of harvesting textual resources from the web and structuring them into distributed argumentative dialogues. This paper introduces a prototype software system for performing argument blogging and storing the resultant dialogues so that they can be analysed and reused.”
Citation: S. Wells, C. Gourlay, and C. Reed, “Argument Blogging”, (2009), in 9th International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 9). IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, California, U.S.
Our SICSA Distinguished Visitor, Henry Prakken, is delivering a masterclass today aimed at PhD students on the topic of Logics for Argumentation. We will be meeting from 1pm to 4pm in the seminar room in the School of Computing.
In recent years, argumentation has become an increasingly popular topic in
the symbolic study of commonsense reasoning and inter-agent communication.
In logical models of commonsense reasoning, the argumentation metaphor has
proved to overcome some drawbacks of other formalisms. Many of these have
a mathematical nature that is remote from how people actually perceive
their everyday commonsense reasoning, which makes it difficult to
understand and trust the behavior of an intelligent system. The
argumentation approach bridges this gap by providing logical formalisms
that are rigid enough to be formally studied and implemented, while at the
same time being close enough to informal reasoning to be understood by
designers and users. In the current course the fundamental concepts and
structure of argumentation logics will be discussed.
Our SICSA visitor, Prof. Henry Prakken, is delivery a seminar today entitled, “Sense-making software for fact finding in law“. We will be in Wolfson at noon as usual. Henry will also be leading our weekly reading group session this afternoon.
Adam Wyner, from London, who is working with folks at UCL and Liverpool, amongst others, and who has PhDs both in linguistics from Cornell and also in computer science from Kings, is visiting us today. He will be speaking on “From Arguments in Natural Language to Argumentation Frameworks” at 1200 in the seminar room.
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.
Helena Lindgren from the Computer Science Department at the University of Umeå is visiting the group this week to find out more about what we have been doing, and to kick off a collaboration for which she has won funding from VINNOVA, the Swedish funding council. Helena has experience of building decision support systems in healthcare, with prototypes running in Sweden, Korea and Japan, and she is now working to integrate argumentation structured around AIF representations into those systems.
There is a small meeting tomorrow at the Computer Science Department at the University of Liverpool on Argument and Evidence, organised by Floris Bex. It forms a part of Henry Prakken, Gerard Vreeswijk and Bart Verheij’s Making Sense of Evidence project, on which Chris is a consultant. Chris has been invited to give a talk there on “Argument schemes in monologue and dialogue”. The monologic/dialogic link is one which the ARG group at Dundee is particularly focused on right now, building on a paper by Chris and Doug Walton from OSSA 2007, and the more recent AIF+ paper presented at COMMA. Tomorrow will be an opportunity to explore these ideas in an evidential context.
Today, Rafael Bordini is visiting the group and will be giving a seminar on, A Verifiable Approach to Programming Multi-Agent Systems. He will be talking at 12.30 in Wolfson.
The Dundee Contemporary Arts centre has a series of “dialogues” - public lectures on various topics, usually presented in dialogic form. Chris is giving a lecture with Jesse Hoey this evening (at 7pm in the DCA meeting room) entitled How to Build a Mind. The lecture hopes to explore the debate about symbol grounding and embodiment through some general introduction to AI systems and specific exploration of Jesse’s research and the work in ARG:dundee. The lecture is open to all and free.
Simon gave a presentation on the Argument Blogging project to CMNA 9 held at IJCAI in Pasadena recently. As described in a previous post argument blogging is the process of harvesting textual resources from the WWW and structuring them in terms of argumentative dialogues. The aim is to support distributed dialogues occuring online and to capture those interactions in a form that can be reused.
