Arguing Using Opponent Models

Peer reviewedPostprin

Amusing Ourselves to Health and Happiness

Summary Our traditional communication methods, with their emphasis on mainly cognitive and rational appeals, prove to be insufficient for target audiences that are low literate. Other, more emotionally appealing and popular communication methods need to be brought into play such as integrating social change issues in entertainment formats in theater, film, music, television, new media, or experience parks. This is known as the Entertainment-Education (EE) strategy. We know from various studies that Entertainment-Education programs can attract large audiences in a way that conventional didactic approaches cannot. Positive effects have been reported on the awareness of, and attitudes toward social change issues. Neil Postman, in 1985, published his polemic book Amusing Ourselves to Death about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse. While Postman chose a culturally pessimistic view, Dr. Martine Bouman flips the coin and investigates the potential positive role of entertainment media on social change. In her eyes Amusing Ourselves to Health and Happiness, is a promising proposition that deserves a thorough scientific approach. The Special Chair of Entertainment Media and Social Change seeks to effectively reach vulnerable groups in Dutch society and to bridge the realms of media, health and science. By establishing strong collaborative partnerships, all stakeholders can contribute to a healthier society. The Special Chair has been established by the Netherlands Entertainment-Education Foundation. It is part of a broader project MediaLab: Health for all, that has been made possible by a donation from the Friends Lottery in partnership with the Alzheimer Foundation, Kidney Foundation and Heart Foundation

Argumentation and disagreement:a pluralistic approach

In our everyday life and in the public sphere, we often find disagreements that the parties cannot resolve nor even overcome. We might call them persistent disagreements. The main question of this thesis is: “What can the parties do to overcome disagreements reasonably, especially when disagreements are persistent?” I argue that the most reasonable way to deal with disagreement is by using argumentation, whereby I approach argumentation pluralistically. This pluralistic approach implies an expansion of traditional approaches to argumentation like pragma-dialectics or informal logic. According to this pluralistic approach, rational persuasion need not be the only goal of argumentation, because it rarely succeeds, especially in the case of persistent disagreement. Therefore, a pluralistic approach to argumentation implies: a) that the parties might overcome their disagreements by reasonable means different from persuasion - among these means we can consider deliberation, negotiation and settlement; b) that if those means revolve around presenting reasons, they should be considered under the concept argumentation; c) that sometimes persuasion is necessary, but that even then, if the setting of the dialogue is sub-optimal, as in the persistent case, we need a general or nonspecific normative approach to evaluate the contributions of the parties; d) that when fallacies are presented, the proper response to them will depend on certain circumstances of the dialogue, considering the goal of overcoming disagreements reasonably; e) that for overcoming disagreements the parties may need to shift between different dialogue types, and that those shifts have special conditions of their own

Communication risk and strategy in temporary organizations

Communication is a critical and emerging metric for successful outcomes in the high-stakes field of project management. Professional management societies have quantified financial losses caused by ineffective communication. Consulting project management exemplifies a maximum communication risk environment - misunderstanding threatens project finances, strict deadlines, and technical benchmarks - exacerbated by the complexity of a temporary organization structure. The context of work in a temporary organization adds layers of ambiguity to project communications - an ill-structured domain in technical communication terms. Formal study of communication in temporary organizations is relatively new. Recent studies are derived from engineering and business management perspectives. This baseline study investigates risk and strategy in temporary organizations from a communication perspective. Project management consultants dialogue about their experiences of project risk and communication strategy in a critical incident interview. This research identifies the communication complexities of work in these temporary contexts. Contrasting the base communication models of professional project management, this study proposes rhetorical analysis as a systems thinking strategy for project communication. This thesis argues that professional technical communication is strategic expertise and advocates humanistic strategies to mitigate the elevated sociotechnical communication risk within a temporary organization

Case-Based Argumentation Framework. Strategies

In agent societies, agents perform complex tasks that require different levels of intelligence and give rise to interactions among them. From these interactions, conflicts of opinion can arise, specially when MAS become adaptive and open with heterogeneous agents dynamically entering in or leaving the system. Therefore, software agents willing to participate in this type of systems will require to include extra capabilities to explicitly represent and generate agreements on top of the simpler ability to interact. In addition, agents can take advantage of previous argumentation experiences to follow dialogue strategies and easily persuade other agents to accept their opinions. Our insight is that CBR can be very useful to manage argumentation in open MAS and devise argumentation strategies based on previous argumentation experiences. To demonstrate the foundations of this suggestion, this report presents the work that we have done to develop case-based argumentation strategies in agent societies. Thus, we propose a case-based argumentation framework for agent societies and define heuristic dialogue strategies based on it. The framework has been implemented and evaluated in a real customer support application.Heras Barberá, SM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2011). Case-Based Argumentation Framework. Strategies. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1109

Reinforcement Learning for Argumentation

Argumentation as a logical reasoning approach plays an important role in improving communication, increasing agree-ability, and resolving conflicts in multi-agent-systems (MAS). The present research aims to explore the effectiveness of argumentation in reinforcement learning of intelligent agents in terms of, outperforming baseline agents, learning transfer between argument graphs, and improving relevance and coherence of dialogue quality. This research developed `ARGUMENTO+' to encourage a reinforcement learning agent (RL agent) playing abstract argument game for improving performance against different baseline agents by using a newly proposed state representation in order to make each state unique. When attempting to generalise this approach to other argumentation graphs, the RL agent was not able to effectively identify the argument patterns that are transferable to other domains. In order to improve the effectiveness of the RL agent to recognise argument patterns, this research adopted a logic-based dialogue game approach with richer argument representations. In the DE dialogue game, the RL agent played against hard-coded heuristic agents and showed improved performance compared to the baseline agents by using a reward function that encourages the RL agent to win the game with minimum number of moves. This also allowed the RL agent to adopt its own strategy, make moves, and learn to argue. This thesis also presents a new reward function that makes the RL agent's dialogue more coherent and relevant than its opponents. The RL agent was designed to recognise argument patterns, i.e. argumentation schemes and evidence support sources, which can be related to different domains. The RL agent used a transfer learning method to generalise and transfer experiences and speed up learning