Debating Technology for Dialogical Argument:Sensemaking, Engagement and Analytics

Debating technologies, a newly emerging strand of research into computational technologies to support human debating, offer a powerful way of providing naturalistic, dialogue-based interaction with complex information spaces. The full potential of debating technologies for dialogical argument can, however, only be realized once key technical and engineering challenges are overcome, namely data structure, data availability, and interoperability between components. Our aim in this article is to show that the Argument Web, a vision for integrated, reusable, semantically rich resources connecting views, opinions, arguments, and debates online, offers a solution to these challenges. Through the use of a running example taken from the domain of citizen dialogue, we demonstrate for the first time that different Argument Web components focusing on sensemaking, engagement, and analytics can work in concert as a suite of debating technologies for rich, complex, dialogical argument

CARBON a Web application and a RESTful API for argumentation

This thesis documents the development of Collaborative Argumentation Brought Online (CARBON). Collaborative Argumentation Brought Online (CARBON) aims to make abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) available via HTTP by providing a RESTful API and a JavaScript heavy application, that allows to use ADFs in a wiki context on top of that API. The thesis summarizes basic concepts of abstract argumentation using examples of Dung argumentation frameworks (AFs), bipolar argumentation frameworks (BAFs) and abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs). The advantages of using Haskell as a programming language for server side software are demonstrated by discussing central concepts of functional programming and how these influenced the design or our solutions and simplified the creation of a RESTful API. It is described, how argumentation can be embedded in a wiki, and how a mapping between wiki articles and statements can be established to enable users to create new content while still being able to work with ADFs. To simplify the creation of acceptance conditions, a custom approach to proof standards is presented that allows to translate a bipolar argumentation framework (BAF) with proof standards into a ADF

Visualisation techniques to facilitate argument exploration

Visualisation is a graphical representation that is used to aid understanding and gain insight into information. Similarly, visualising arguments can help people to explore argument structure and comprehend knowledge associated with tough problems. In this thesis, we focus on representing arguments, especially when data size increase, which causes difficulty in exploring and understanding arguments. A fundamental problem from an argument perspective is that understanding argument requires users to understand the overview, read the content of arguments, and recognise how the arguments support, compete, and conflict with each other. Applying information visualisation techniques or combination between them in an argumentation domain can improve the navigation and exploration in argument data. The main contribution of this thesis is proposing various visualisation approaches for gaining insights on argument data and helping experts to understand arguments. Based on collected user requirements, the work presents several prototypes that provide an overview of arguments while giving users the ability to read the argument text. To compare and evaluate our proposed techniques and tools, a controlled user study and interviews with argument experts are conducted. The collected qualitative and quantitative results are thoroughly analysed using relevant statistical tests

Interchanging arguments between Carneades and AIF

We have implemented a translator that translates Carneades Argument Graphs as specified in the LKIF files of the Carneades editor to a database specification of the Argument Interchange Format and vice versa. In this paper the algorithms for this translation are presented