Defeasible Argumentation of Software Architectures

Defeasible argumentation is typical of legal and scientific reasoning. A defeasible argument is one in which the conclusion can be accepted tentatively in relation with the evidence known so far, but may need to be retracted as new evidence comes in. This paper analyses the role of defeasible argumentation in the explanation and evaluation of architectural decisions. We analyse technical explanations offered by engineers at Twitter and eBay about several architectural decisions adopted in those systems. We generalize these examples in four argumentation schemes. We also study the typical case of reasoning with a formal model of an architecture, and we infer a fifth argumentation scheme. Finally, we apply Hastings’ method of attaching a set of critical questions to each scheme. We show that the existence of critical questions reveals that the inferred schemes are defeasible: in argumentation theory, if a respondent asks one of the critical questions matching a scheme and the proponent of an argument fails to offer an adequate answer, the argument defaults and the conclusion is retracted. This dialogical structure is the basis of typical architectural evaluations. We conclude that the provided evidence supports the hypothesis that defeasible argumentation is employed in architectural evaluation. In this context, a rich catalogue of argumentation schemes is a useful tool for the architect to organize his or her reasoning; critical questions assist the architect in identifying the weak points of his or her explanations, and provide the evaluation team with a checklist of issues to be raised.Universidad de Sevilla VPPI-U

A literature review. Introduction to the special issue

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 PTDC/FER-FIL/28278/2017 CHIST-ERA/0002/2019Argumentation schemes [35, 80, 91] are a relatively recent notion that continues an extremely ancient debate on one of the foundations of human reasoning, human comprehension, and obviously human argumentation, i.e., the topics. To understand the revolutionary nature of Walton’s work on this subject matter, it is necessary to place it in the debate that it continues and contributes to, namely a view of logic that is much broader than the formalistic perspective that has been adopted from the 20th century until nowadays. With his book Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning, Walton attempted to start a dialogue between three different fields or views on human reasoning – one (argumentation theory) very recent, one (dialectics) very ancient and with a very long tradition, and one (formal logic) relatively recent, but dominating in philosophy. Argumentation schemes were proposed as dialectical instruments, in the sense that they represented arguments not only as formal relations, but also as pragmatic inferences, as they at the same time depend on what the interlocutors share and accept in a given dialogical circumstance, and affect their dialogical relation. In this introduction, the notion of argumentation scheme will be analyzed in detail, showing its different dimensions and its defining features which make them an extremely useful instrument in Artificial Intelligence. This theoretical background will be followed by a literature review on the uses of the schemes in computing, aimed at identifying the most important areas and trends, the most promising proposals, and the directions of future research.publishersversionpublishe

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Normative Practical Reasoning via Argumentation and Dialogue

Postprin

The Dimensions of Argumentative Texts and Their Assessment

The definition and the assessment of the quality of argumentative texts has become an increasingly crucial issue in education, classroom discourse, and argumentation theory. The different methods developed and used in the literature are all characterized by specific perspectives that fail to capture the complexity of the subject matter, which remains ill-defined and not systematically investigated. This paper addresses this problem by building on the four main dimensions of argument quality resulting from the definition of argument and the literature in classroom discourse: dialogicity, accountability, relevance, and textuality (DART). We use and develop the insights from the literature in education and argumentation by integrating the frameworks that capture both the textual and the argumentative nature of argumentative texts. This theoretical background will be used to propose a method for translating the DART dimensions into specific and clear proxies and evaluation criteria

Building bridges between doctors and patients: the design and pilot evaluation of a training session in argumentation for chronic pain experts

Shared decision-making requires doctors to be competent in exchanging views with patients to identify the appropriate course of action. In this paper we focus on the potential of a course in argumentation as a promising way to empower doctors in presenting their viewpoints and addressing those of patients. Argumentation is the communication process in which the speaker, through the use of reasons, aims to convince the interlocutor of the acceptability of a viewpoint. The value of argumentation skills for doctors has been addressed in the literature. Yet, there is no research on what a course on argumentation might look like. In this paper, we present the content and format of a training session in argumentation for doctors and discuss some insights gained from a pilot study that examined doctors' perceived strengths and limitations vis-à-vis this training