An Argumentation Interface for Expert Opinion Evidence

Tribunals have come to depend increasingly on expertise for determining the facts in cases. However, current legal methods have proved problematic to work with. This paper argues that, as a special model of public understanding of science, assessing expertise should consider source credibility of expertise from internal aspects, including scientific validity and reliability, and external aspects involving the credibility of experts. Using the Carneades Argumentation System we show that the internal and the external aspects are mediated by the structure of the argument from expert opinion with its matching set of critical questions

Toward an Argumentation-based Dialogue framework for Human-Robot Collaboration

Successful human-robot collaboration with a common goal requires peer interaction in which humans and robots cooperate and complement each other\u27s expertise. Formal human-robot dialogue in which there is peer interaction is still in its infancy, though. My research recognizes three aspects of human-robot collaboration that call for dialogue: responding to discovery, pre-empting failure, and recovering from failure. In these scenarios the partners need the ability to challenge, persuade, exchange and expand beliefs about a joint action in order to collaborate through dialogue. My research identifies three argumentation-based dialogues: a persuasion dialogue to resolve disagreement, an information-seeking dialogue to expand individual knowledge, and an inquiry dialogue to share knowledge. A theoretical logic-based framework, a formalized dialogue protocol based on argumentation theory, and argumentation-based dialogue games were developed to provide dialogue support for peer interaction. The work presented in this thesis is the first to apply argumentation theory and three different logic-based argumentation dialogues for use in human-robot collaboration. The research presented in this thesis demonstrates a practical, real-time implementation in which persuasion, inquiry, and information-seeking dialogues are applied to shared decision making for human-robot collaboration in a treasure hunt game domain. My research investigates if adding peer interaction enabled through argumentation-based dialogue to an HRI system improves system performance and user experience during a collaborative task when compared to an HRI system that is capable of only supervisory interaction with minimal dialogue. Results from user studies in physical and simulated human-robot collaborative environments, which involved 108 human participants who interacted with a robot as peer and supervisor, are presented in this thesis. My research contributes to both the human-robot interaction (HRI) and the argumentation communities. First, it brings into HRI a structured method for a robot to maintain its beliefs, to reason using those beliefs, and to interact with a human as a peer via argumentation-based dialogues. The structured method allows the human-robot collaborators to share beliefs, respond to discovery, expand beliefs to recover from failure, challenge beliefs, or resolve conflicts by persuasion. It allows a robot to challenge a human or a human to challenge a robot to prevent human or robot errors. Third, my research provides a comprehensive subjective and objective analysis of the effectiveness of an HRI System with peer interaction that is enabled through argumentation-based dialogue. I compare this peer interaction to a system that is capable of only supervisory interaction with minimal dialogue. My research contributes to the harder questions for human-robot collaboration: what kind of human-robot dialogue support can enhance peer-interaction? How can we develop models to formalize those features? How can we ensure that those features really help, and how do they help? Human-robot dialogue that can aid shared decision making, support the expansion of individual or shared knowledge, and resolve disagreements between collaborative human-robot teams will be much sought after as human society transitions from a world of robot-as-a-tool to robot-as-a-partner. My research presents a version of peer interaction enabled through argumentation-based dialogue that allows humans and robots to work together as partners

A Generative Framework for Argumentation-Based Inquiry Dialogues

My PhD focusses on argumentation-based communication between agents. I take, as a starting point, the argumentation system proposed by Garcia and Simari [22], which allows a single agent to reason about its beliefs. I define a novel dialogue system that allows two agents to use Garcia and Simari's system to carry out inter-agent argumentation. I define two specific protocols for two different types of inquiry dialogue that I define: argument inquiry and warrant inquiry. Argument inquiry dialogues are often embedded within warrant inquiry dialogues. Other existing inquiry dialogue systems only model dialogues, meaning that they describe what a legal inquiry dialogue is, but they do 1}6t provide the means to actually generate such a dialogue. Such systems provide a protocol, which dictates what the possible legal next moves are at each point in a dialogue but not which ofthese moves to make. I present a system that not only includes two dialogue game style protocols, one for the argument inquiry dialogue and one for the warrant inquiry dialogue, but also includes an intelligent strategy, for an agent to use with these protocols, that selects exactly one of the legal moves to make. As my system is generative, it allows me to investigate the precise behaviour ofthe dialogues it produces. 1propose a benchmark against which 1compare my dialogues, and use this to define soundness and completeness properties for argument inquiry and warrant inquiry dialogues. 1show that these properties hold for all dialogues produced by my system. Finally, I go on to define another intelligent strategy for use with warrant inquiry dialogues. 1show that this also leads to sound and complete dialogues but, in many situations, reduces the redundancy seen in the dialectical tree produced during the dialogue. [22] Alejandro J. Garcia and Guillermo R. Simari. Defeasible logic programming an argumentative approach. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo