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.

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.

The group’s new, EPSRC-funded Dialectical Argumentation Machines project is recruiting its research assistants. The advertisements for the first and second posts are now available.

This is Mark Snaith presenting his senior honours project entitled “Online Visualisation of Argument” at the annual School of Computing degree show at the University of Dundee [ Download: xvid avi format (47.6 MB) ]. The main aim of this project was to provide a simple way to visualise arguments online using a flash widget to graphically render Argument Interchange Format (AIF) resources. Mark is spending the summer working with ARG:dundee to further develop the OVA software suite.

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.

EPSRC has announced that it is funding a major new project exploring the deployment of argumentation technologies in online environments. The £0.6m initiative will use the AIF standard as a cornerstone, and will partner with high-impact online providers to deliver live systems based on computational models of philosophical argumentation theory. The Dialectical Argumentation Machines project will look at the monologue-dialogue link and the relationship between abstract and concrete argumentation in order to build systems that can bridge the gap between everyday argument and formal techniques.

The abstract of the project is available from the EPSRC, and the project has a new home page.

An EPSRC funded project covering 2002-6 exploring novel models of agent communication founded upon argumentation