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.

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.

Prof. Henry Prakken from the Universities of Utrecht and Groningen in the Netherlands will be a SICSA Distinguished Visitor with ARG:dundee for the month of July 2009. Over that period, we will be exploring models that combine different theories of argumentation. He will also be delivering talks at Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh and offering a PhD workshop.

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.

Phew. The reviewing season is in full flow, and with ever more events in the argumentation world, it’s getting to be hard work! It’s interesting to note them as a way of seeing how things are progressing. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been reviewing for:

• AAMAS 2009 (which has Argumentation as one of its keywords again)
• IJCAI 2009 (which has Argumentation has one of its keywords for the first time)
• The 2nd Persuasive Technology Symposium at AISB 2009
• ArgMAS 2009 at AAMAS
• CMNA 2009 at IJCAI

And this is an ‘off’ year: next year there’s COMMA and ISSA too.

Bart Verheij, from the AI department at the University of Groningen is visiting us for a couple of days. He is delivering a seminar on Waking Up from the Logical Dream, Or: Argumentation as a Content-Driven Activity at 12 noon today in Wolfson.

Waking Up from the Logical Dream, Or: Argumentation as a Content-Driven Activity - Bart Verheij

Imagine yourself being in court, having to defend your innocence of a serious crime. Let’s suppose that your defense fails, and you end up behind bars. Was it your - probably imperfect - control of the logic of argumentation that made you lose? Or, was the problem more a matter of content, for instance, your unconvincing alibi, or lack of knowledge of the law?

This talk will use the recent advances in the logic of argumentation as a starting point, continuing to the hard issue of understanding how much logic is helpful for argumentation. In the talk, the issue is addressed from the perspectives of argumentation software and of argumentation schemes. It will become clear that Toulmin’s research agenda (dating from the 1950s) is still relevant.

Prof. Andrew Ravenscroft from the Learning Technology Research Institute at London Metropolitan University is visiting the group today. He will be delivering a seminar entitled, The thinking web? Designing tools and mashups for cyber-argumentation today at 12 noon in Wolfson.

This talk will review over a decade of design-based research that has: investigated the relationship between argumentation and thinking in learning contexts; and, designed digital tools that model argumentation and support its practice. This Learning Sciences approach to learning interaction design centres around the notion of ‘dialogue games’. This is a paradigm that can be used analytically or prescriptively to further or understanding of dialectical dialogue processes and how these can be

modelled and promoted for educational purposes.

The talk will emphasise: our work in applied computational linguistics that originally investigated and modelled educational argumentation; the design and evaluation of deployable dialogue game tools, on a relatively large-scale, that arose out of the computational modelling; and, present

our ongoing work that is synthesising dialogue game technologies and ideas with SOA and social software approaches – to realise accessible and widespread mashups, or ‘eco-systems’, for cyber-argumentation.

Finally, I will reflect on and open up the discussion about where this work might be taking us in terms of future web-technologies and related digital practices, reflecting on questions such as “What sort of

thinking do we need, by man and machines, in the 21C?”

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.

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.

The International Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA) has been running for eight years, and there is now a website that for the first time draws together all the CMNA workshops and (almost) all of the papers that have been presented at them. CMNA has a tradition of attracting a broad interdisciplinary audience with perhaps an increasing emphasis on natural, i.e. real, arguments and the computational systems that model, engage with, generate, analyse, aggregate, transform and mediate such arguments. ARG:dundee has a long association with the series - Chris has co-organised them with Floriana Grasso and other colleagues since the start in 2001, and various members of the team have had papers in very nearly every event.

CMNA is unusual because it doesn’t publish proceedings (though there was a special issue of IJIS publishing revised versions of the best papers from 2001-3, and another special issue is due). Instead, it is designed to foster creative discussion. If you’re interested, the next installment will be hosted by ECAI’2008.