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.

• 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.

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.

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.