A short survey of discourse representation models

With the advancement of technology and the wide adoption of ontologies as knowledge representation formats, in the last decade, a handful of models were proposed for the externalization of the rhetoric and argumentation captured within scientific publications. Conceptually, most of these models share a similar representation form of the scientific publication, i.e. as a series of interconnected elementary knowledge items. The main differences are given by the terminology used, the types of rhetorical and/or argumentation relations connecting the knowledge items and the foundational theories supporting these relations. This paper analyzes the state of the art and provides a concise comparative overview of the five most prominent discourse representation models, with the goal of sketching an unified model for discourse representation

Tentative Reference Acts? ‘Recognitional Demonstratives’ as Means of Suggesting Mutual Knowledge – or Overriding a Lack of It

In an explorative study on German oral corpus data we investigate recognitional use of proximal demonstratives as a means of explicit speaker-hearer interaction shaping the discourse structure. We show that recognitionals mark tentative reference acts in that speakers suggest - or pretend - mutual knowledge of the referent, at the same time appealing to the hearers to accept the reference. Hearers may tacitly or explicitly accept the referential act or deny it asking for clarification, in the latter case making speakers change the intended local discourse topic. On these grounds we argue against a differentiation between recognitional and indefinite demonstratives, subsuming both as kinds of recognitional use under ‘pretended’ cognitive proximity

Strength in coalitions: Community detection through argument similarity

We present a novel argumentation-based method for finding and analyzing communities in social media on the Web, where a community is regarded as a set of supported opinions that might be in conflict. Based on their stance, we identify argumentative coalitions to define them; then, we apply a similarity-based evaluation method over the set of arguments in the coalition to determine the level of cohesion inherent to each community, classifying them appropriately. Introducing conflict points and attacks between coalitions based on argumentative (dis)similarities to model the interaction between communities leads to considering a meta-argumentation framework where the set of coalitions plays the role of the set of arguments and where the attack relation between the coalitions is assigned a particular strength which is inherited from the arguments belonging to the coalition. Various semantics are introduced to consider attacks' strength to particularize the effect of the new perspective. Finally, we analyze a case study where all the elements of the formal construction of the formalism are exercised.Fil: Budan, Paola Daniela. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Cs.exactas y Tecnologías. Departamento de Informatica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Cs.exactas y Tecnologias. Instituto de Investigacion En Informatica y Sistemas de Informacion.; ArgentinaFil: Escañuela Gonzalez, Melisa Gisselle. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Tecnologías. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Cs.exactas y Tecnologias. Instituto de Investigacion En Informatica y Sistemas de Informacion.; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Budan, Maximiliano Celmo David. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Cs.exactas y Tecnologias. Instituto de Investigacion En Informatica y Sistemas de Informacion.; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Tecnologías. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Martinez, Maria Vanina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Simari, Guillermo Ricardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentin

Abstract Argumentation Frameworks with Domain Assignments

Argumentative discourse rarely consists of opinions whose claims apply universally. As with logical statements, an argument applies to specific objects in the universe or relations among them, and may have exceptions. In this paper, we propose an argumentation formalism that allows associating arguments with a domain of application. Appropriate semantics are given, which formalise the notion of partial argument acceptance, i.e., the set of objects or relations that an argument can be applied to. We show that our proposal is in fact equivalent to the standard Argumentation Frameworks of Dung, but allows a more intuitive and compact expression of some core concepts of commonsense and non-monotonic reasoning, such as the scope of an argument, exceptions, relevance and others

Weighted logics for artificial intelligence : an introductory discussion

International audienceBefore presenting the contents of the special issue, we propose a structured introductory overview of a landscape of the weighted logics (in a general sense) that can be found in the Artificial Intelligence literature, highlighting their fundamental differences and their application areas

Mixing Dyadic and Deliberative Opinion Dynamics in an Agent-Based Model of Group Decision-Making

International audienceIn this article, we propose an agent-based model of opinion diffusion and voting where influence among individuals and deliberation in a group are mixed. The model is inspired from social modeling, as it describes an iterative process of collective decision-making that repeats a series of interindividual influences and collective deliberation steps, and studies the evolution of opinions and decisions in a group. It also aims at founding a comprehensive model to describe collective decision-making as a combination of two different paradigms: argumentation theory and ABM-influence models, which are not obvious to combine as a formal link between them is required. In our model, we find that deliberation, through the exchange of arguments, reduces the variance of opinions and the proportion of extremists in a population as long as not too much deliberation takes place in the decision processes. Additionally, if we define the correct collective decisions in the system in terms of the arguments that should be accepted, allowing for more deliberation favors convergence towards the correct decisions

Theoretical Analysis and Implementation of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks with Domain Assignments

A representational limitation of current argumentation frameworks is their inability to deal with sets of entities and their properties, for example to express that an argument is applicable for a specific set of entities that have a certain property and not applicable for all the others. In order to address this limitation, we recently introduced Abstract Argumentation Frameworks with Domain Assignments (AAFDs), which extend Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AAFs) by assigning to each argument a domain of application, i.e., a set of entities for which the argument is believed to apply. We provided formal definitions of AAFDs and their semantics, showed with examples how this model can support various features of commonsense and non-monotonic reasoning, and studied its relation to AAFs. In this paper, aiming to provide a deeper insight into this new model, we present more results on the relation between AAFDs and AAFs and the properties of the AAFD semantics, and we introduce an alternative, more expressive way to define the domains of arguments using logical predicates. We also offer an implementation of AAFDs based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) and evaluate it using a range of experiments with synthetic datasets