The "Games of Argumentation" web platform

This demo presents the web system “Games of Argumentation”, which allows users to build argumentation graphs and examine them in a game-theoretical manner using up to three different evaluation techniques. The concurrent evaluations of arguments using different techniques, which may be qualitative or quantitative, provides a significant aid to users in both understanding game-theoretical argumentation semantics and pinpointing their differences from alternative semantics, traditional or otherwise, to differentiate between them

On the Optimized Utilization of Smart Contracts in DLTs from the Perspective of Legal Representation and Legal Reasoning

Smart contracts are computer programs stored in blockchain which open a wide range of applications but also raise some important issues. When we convert traditional legal contracts written in natural language into smart contracts written in lines of code, problems will arise. Translation errors will exist in the process of conversion since the law in natural language is ambiguous and imprecise, full of conflicts, and the emergence of new evidence may influence the processing of reasoning. This research project has three purposes: the first aims at the resolution of these problems from logic and technical perspective to develop the accuracy and human-readability of smart contracts, by exploring a more novel and advanced logic-based language to represent legal contracts, and analyzing an extended argumentation framework with rich expressiveness; the second purpose is to investigate various existing technologies like Akoma Ntoso and Legal- RuleML, making the legal knowledge and reasoning machine-readable and be linked with the real world; third, to investigate the implementation of a mature multi-agent system incorporating the software agents with sensing, inferring, learning, decision-making and social abilities that can be fitted onto DLTs

An Axiomatic Approach to Support in Argumentation

International audienceIn the context of bipolar argumentation (argumentation with two kinds of interaction, attacks and supports), we present an axiomatic approach for taking into account a special interpretation of the support relation, the necessary support. We propose constraints that should be imposed to a bipolar argumentation system using this interpretation. Some of these constraints concern the new attack relations, others concern acceptability. We extend basic Dung’s framework in different ways in order to propose frameworks suitable for encoding these constraints. By the way, we propose a formal study of properties of necessary support

An argumentation framework with backing and undercutting

In this work we will combine two important notions for the argumentation community into Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs). These notions correspond to Toulmin’s backings and Pollock’s undercutting defeaters. We will define Backing-Undercutting Argumentation Frameworks (BUAFs), an extension of AFs that includes a specialized support relation, a distinction between different attack types, and a preference relation among arguments. Thus, BUAFs will provide a more concrete approach to represent argumentative or non-monotonic scenarios where information can be attacked and supportedPresentado en el XII Workshop Agentes y Sistemas Inteligentes (WASI)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Confronting value-based argumentation frameworks with people’s assessment of argument strength

We reported a series of experiments carried out to confront the underlying intuitions of value-based argumentation frameworks (VAFs) with the intuitions of ordinary people. Our goal was twofold. On the one hand, we intended to test VAF as a descriptive theory of human argument evaluations. On the other, we aimed to gain new insights from empirical data that could serve to improve VAF as a normative model. The experiments showed that people's acceptance of arguments deviates from VAF's semantics and is rather correlated with the importance given to the promoted values, independently of the perceptions of argument interactions through attacks and defeats. Furthermore, arguments were often perceived as promoting more than one value with different relative strengths. Individuals' analyses of scenarios were also affected by external factors such as biases and arguments not explicit in the framework. Finally, we confirmed that objective acceptance, that is, the acceptance of arguments under any order of the values, was not a frequent behavior. Instead, participants tended to accept only the arguments that promoted the values they subscribe.Fil: Bodanza, Gustavo Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economía. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur; ArgentinaFil: Freidin, Esteban. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economía. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur; Argentin

Empirical Evaluation of Abstract Argumentation: Supporting the Need for Bipolar and Probabilistic Approaches

In dialogical argumentation it is often assumed that the involved parties always correctly identify the intended statements posited by each other, realize all of the associated relations, conform to the three acceptability states (accepted, rejected, undecided), adjust their views when new and correct information comes in, and that a framework handling only attack relations is sufficient to represent their opinions. Although it is natural to make these assumptions as a starting point for further research, removing them or even acknowledging that such removal should happen is more challenging for some of these concepts than for others. Probabilistic argumentation is one of the approaches that can be harnessed for more accurate user modelling. The epistemic approach allows us to represent how much a given argument is believed by a given person, offering us the possibility to express more than just three agreement states. It is equipped with a wide range of postulates, including those that do not make any restrictions concerning how initial arguments should be viewed, thus potentially being more adequate for handling beliefs of the people that have not fully disclosed their opinions in comparison to Dung's semantics. The constellation approach can be used to represent the views of different people concerning the structure of the framework we are dealing with, including cases in which not all relations are acknowledged or when they are seen differently than intended. Finally, bipolar argumentation frameworks can be used to express both positive and negative relations between arguments. In this paper we describe the results of an experiment in which participants judged dialogues in terms of agreement and structure. We compare our findings with the aforementioned assumptions as well as with the constellation and epistemic approaches to probabilistic argumentation and bipolar argumentation