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.”
• Paper Link: wells2009blogging.pdf
• Presentation Link: cmna2009.pdf
• 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.

Argument in AI has had a dedicated workshop series in CMNA since 2001; argument in MAS has had its own forum, ArgMAS since 2004. The community as a whole has had the COMMA conference series since 2006. But folk have had to publish in an enormous variety of journals, often through special issues dedicated to argumentation. Finally, a new journal has been established to support the growing community. It is published by Taylor and Francis, who have a strong track record in both humanities and sciences, and have worked with interdisciplinary areas such as ours before. The new journal, Argument & Computation, is now open for business.

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.

Doug Walton and Chris Reed are talking today at OSSA about the link between argumentation schemes and dialogue. For although schemes are inherently dialogical (think about the role that critical questions play, for example), they have not previously been treated in such a way as to integrate them into models of dialogue. The paper provides a first step in this direction. A commentary on the paper is given by Taeda Tomic from Uppsala University.

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.

Some of the work related to the ArgDF project with Iyad Rahwan has also been accepted for AAAI-07 in Vancouver. This paper is a complement to the one accepted to Artificial Intelligence a couple of weeks ago.

The current bibliographic data is:

Rahwan, I., Zablith, F. & Reed, C. (2007, to appear) “Towards Large Scale Argumentation Support on the Semantic Web” in Proceedings of AAAI-07, Vancouver, AAAI Press / MIT Press.

I’m delighted to say that a paper describing our work with Iyad Rahwan on ArgDF has been accepted to the special issue of Artificial Intelligence on Argumentation edited by Paul Dunne and Trevor Bench-Capon.

The current bibliographic data is:

Rahwan, I., Zablith, F. & Reed, C. (2007, to appear) “Laying the Foundations for a World Wide Argument Web”, Artificial Intelligence.