Probabilistic Argumentation. An Equational Approach

There is a generic way to add any new feature to a system. It involves 1) identifying the basic units which build up the system and 2) introducing the new feature to each of these basic units. In the case where the system is argumentation and the feature is probabilistic we have the following. The basic units are: a. the nature of the arguments involved; b. the membership relation in the set S of arguments; c. the attack relation; and d. the choice of extensions. Generically to add a new aspect (probabilistic, or fuzzy, or temporal, etc) to an argumentation network can be done by adding this feature to each component a-d. This is a brute-force method and may yield a non-intuitive or meaningful result. A better way is to meaningfully translate the object system into another target system which does have the aspect required and then let the target system endow the aspect on the initial system. In our case we translate argumentation into classical propositional logic and get probabilistic argumentation from the translation. Of course what we get depends on how we translate. In fact, in this paper we introduce probabilistic semantics to abstract argumentation theory based on the equational approach to argumentation networks. We then compare our semantics with existing proposals in the literature including the approaches by M. Thimm and by A. Hunter. Our methodology in general is discussed in the conclusion

Learning with comments: An analysis of comments and community on Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow (SO) has become a primary source for learning how to code, with community features supporting asking and answering questions, upvoting to signify approval of content, and comments to extend questions and answers. While past research has considered the value of posts, often based on upvoting, little has examined the role of comments. Beyond value in explaining code, comments may offer new ways of looking at problems, clarifications of questions or answers, and socially supportive community interactions. To understand the role of comments, a content analysis was conducted to evaluate the key purposes of comments. A coding schema of nine comment categories was developed from open coding on a set of 40 posts and used to classify comments in a larger dataset of 2323 comments from 50 threads over a 6-month period. Results provide insight into the way the comments support learning, knowledge development, and the SO community, and the use and usefulness of the comment feature

The implementation of dialogue-based pedagogy to improve written argumentation amongst secondary school students in Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to find solutions on how to improve secondary school students’ persuasive argumentative English essay writing. The participants of this study are groups of ESL students aged 13 and 17 who live and study in a sub-urban area in Malaysia. All students and teachers converse amongst themselves using the Malay language on a daily basis while English language is merely used during classroom interaction time. Not only do they have very little opportunity to communicate using English language in their daily lives and for academic purposes, they also have limited opportunity to learn how to argue persuasively in their English classroom. Thus, they have difficulties in writing two-sided argumentative essays in English. The teaching-to-the-test culture has taken its toll on students’ writing performance when writing argumentative essays. In order to help students to score well in examination, teachers often overlook the need to teach critical thinking skills for the English subject. They focus solely on writing narrative essays as these essays require less critical thinking skill from the students. The Design-Based Research is employed to solve this problem of writing persuasive argumentative essays. Based on the pre-intervention essays written by the participants, it is believed that their difficulties are because of two major factors; insufficient English language skills and no exposure to persuasive argumentation skills. The initial design framework asserts that students should improve their persuasive argumentative essay writing if they are initially exposed to face-to-face group argumentation. However, the findings from the exploratory study revealed that face-to-face group argumentation is unmanageable in the context studied. Hence, an online learning intervention was considered to support secondary school students to improve their written argument. It was developed underpinned by design principles based on Exploratory Talk to achieve persuasive argumentation. The prototype online intervention was tested and developed through a series of iterations. Findings from Iteration 1 show that only a small number of students manage to write two-sided essays because most of them have an extreme attitude when writing about an issue and display a lack of positive transfer from group to individual argumentation. Prior to Iteration 2, the prototype intervention was adapted to tackle the extreme attitude and negative transfer issues by highlighting five elements: face-to-face classroom practice, focus more on three main ground rules, argument game, role of teachers during group argumentation and the use of argument map during the post-intervention essay writing. The findings demonstrate that all students in the second iteration wrote argumentative essays which are more persuasive. The final design framework developed in this study suggests a design framework that could be used by future researchers and ESL teachers at secondary school level who are interested in improving students’ persuasive argumentative essays

Guidelines for the analysis of student web usage in support of primary educational objectives

The Internet and World Wide Web provides huge amounts of information to individuals with access to it. Information is an important driving factor of education and higher education has experienced massive adoption rates of information and communication technologies, and accessing the Web is not an uncommon practice within a higher educational institution. The Web provides numerous benefits and many students rely on the Web for information, communication and technical support. However, the immense amount of information available on the Web has brought about some negative side effects associated with abundant information. Whether the Web is a positive influence on students’ academic well-being within higher education is a difficult question to answer. To understand how the Web is used by students within a higher education institution is not an easy task. However, there are ways to understand the Web usage behaviour of students. Using established methods for gathering useful information from data produced by an institution, Web usage behaviours of students within a higher education institution could be analysed and presented. This dissertation presents guidance for analysing Web traffic within a higher educational institution in order to gain insight into the Web usage behaviours of students. This insight can provide educators with valuable information to bolster their decision-making capacity towards achieving their educational goals

Explain what you see:argumentation-based learning and robotic vision

In this thesis, we have introduced new techniques for the problems of open-ended learning, online incremental learning, and explainable learning. These methods have applications in the classification of tabular data, 3D object category recognition, and 3D object parts segmentation. We have utilized argumentation theory and probability theory to develop these methods. The first proposed open-ended online incremental learning approach is Argumentation-Based online incremental Learning (ABL). ABL works with tabular data and can learn with a small number of learning instances using an abstract argumentation framework and bipolar argumentation framework. It has a higher learning speed than state-of-the-art online incremental techniques. However, it has high computational complexity. We have addressed this problem by introducing Accelerated Argumentation-Based Learning (AABL). AABL uses only an abstract argumentation framework and uses two strategies to accelerate the learning process and reduce the complexity. The second proposed open-ended online incremental learning approach is the Local Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (Local-HDP). Local-HDP aims at addressing two problems of open-ended category recognition of 3D objects and segmenting 3D object parts. We have utilized Local-HDP for the task of object part segmentation in combination with AABL to achieve an interpretable model to explain why a certain 3D object belongs to a certain category. The explanations of this model tell a user that a certain object has specific object parts that look like a set of the typical parts of certain categories. Moreover, integrating AABL and Local-HDP leads to a model that can handle a high degree of occlusion

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N