Non-inferential aspects of<em> Ad Hominem</em> and<em> Ad Baculum</em>

The aim of the paper is to explore the interrelation between persuasion tactics and properties of speech acts. We investigate two types of arguments ad: ad hominem and ad baculum. We show that with both of these tactics, the structures that play a key role are not inferential, but rather ethotic, i.e., related to the speaker's character and trust. We use the concepts of illocutionary force and constitutive conditions related to the character or status of the speaker in order to explain the dynamics of these two techniques. In keeping with the research focus of the Polish School of Argumentation, we examine how the pragmatic and rhetorical aspects of the force of ad hominem and ad baculum arguments exploit trust in the speaker's status to influence the audience's cognition.</p

A Critical Discussion Game for Prohibiting Fallacies

The study of fallacies is at the heart of argumentation studies. In response to Hamblin’s devastating critique of the state of the theory of fallacies in 1970, both formal dialectical and informal approaches to fallacies developed. In the current paper, we focus on an influential informal approach to fallacies, part of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. Central to the pragma-dialectical method for analysing and evaluating argumentative discourse is the ideal model of a critical discussion. In this discussion model, a dialectical perspective on argumentation is combined with a pragmatic take on communicative interaction. By formalising and computationally implementing the model of a critical discussion, we take a first step in the development of software to computationally model argumentative dialogue in which fallacies are prohibited along the pragmadialectical norms. We do this by defining the Critical Discussion Game, a formal dialogue game based on the pragma-dialectical discussion model, executable on an online user-interface which is part of a larger infrastructure of argumentation software

Argument Analytics

Rapid growth in the area of argument mining has resulted in an ever increasing volume of analysed argument data. Being able to store information about arguments people make in favour or against different opinions, decisions and actions is a highly valuable resource, yet extremely challenging for sense-making. How, for example, can an analyst quickly check whether in a corpus of citizen dialogue people tend to rather agree or disagree with new policies proposed by the department of transportation; how can she get an insight into the interactions typical of this specific dialogical context; how can the general public easily see which presidential candidate is currently winning the debate by being able to successfully defend his arguments? In this paper, we propose Argument Analytics – a suite of techniques which provide interpretation of, and insight into, large-scale argument data for both specialist and general audiences

Mining Ethos in Political Debate

Despite the fact it has been recognised since Aristotle that ethos and credibility play a critical role in many types of communication, these facts are rarely studied in linguistically oriented AI which has enjoyed such success in processing complex features as sentiment, opinion, and most recently arguments. This paper shows how a text analysis pipeline of structural and statistical approaches to natural language processing (NLP) can be deployed to tackle ethos by mining linguistic resources from the political domain. We summarise a coding scheme for annotating ethotic expressions; present the first openly available corpus to support further, comparative research in the area; and report results from a system for automatically recognising the presence and polarity of ethotic expressions. Finally, we hypothesise that in the political sphere, ethos analytics – including recognising who trusts whom and who is attacking whose reputation – might act as a powerful toolset for understanding and even anticipating the dynamics of governments. By exploring several examples of correspondence between ethos analytics in political discourse and major events and dynamics in the political landscape, we uncover tantalising evidence in support of this hypothesis

A dialogue game for multi-party goal-setting in health coaching

Goal-setting is a frequently adopted strategy in behaviour change coaching. When setting a goal, it is important that it is understood and agreed upon by all parties, and not simply accepted as-is. We present here a dialogue game for multi-party goal-setting, in which multiple health coaches can contribute in order to find a goal that is acceptable to both the patient, and the coaches themselves. Our proposed game incorporates three important aspects of goal-setting and health coaching, (1) coaches can query each other's proposed goals, (2) the patient takes ownership of the goal, and (3) the patient themselves can propose goals

A System for Dispute Mediation:The Mediation Dialogue Game

We propose a dialogue game for mediation and its formalization in DGDL. This dialectical system is available as software through Arvina for automatic execution. This work expands the literature in dialectical systems, in particular those for more than two players, and shows the practical impact on mediation activity through the opportunity offered to mediators once implemented