Research opportunities for argumentation in social networks

Nowadays, many websites allow social networking between their users in an explicit or implicit way. In this work, we show how argumentation schemes theory can provide a valuable help to formalize and structure on-line discussions and user opinions in decision support and business oriented websites that held social networks between their users. Two real case studies are studied and analysed. Then, guidelines to enhance social decision support and recommendations with argumentation are provided.This work summarises results of the authors joint research, funded by an STMS of the Agreement Technologies COST Action 0801, by the Spanish government grants [CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, and TIN2012-36586-C03-01] and by the GVA project [PROMETEO 2008/051].Heras Barberá, SM.; Atkinson, KM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Grasso, F.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Mcburney, PJ. (2013). Research opportunities for argumentation in social networks. 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Development of a Logic Layer in the Semantic Web: Research Issues

The ontology layer of the semantic web is now mature enough (i.e. standards like RDF, RDFs, OWL, OWL 2) and the next step is to work on a logic layer for the development of advanced reasoning capabilities for knowledge extraction and efficient decision making. Adding logic to the web means using rules to make inferences. Rules are a means of expressing business processes, policies, contracts etc but most of the studies have focused on the use of monotonic logics in layered development of the semantic web which provides no mechanism for representing or handling incomplete or contradictory information respectively. This paper discusses argumentation, semantic web and defeasible logic programming with their distinct features and identifies the different research issues that need to be addressed in order to realize defeasible argumentative reasoning in the semantic web applications

Making sense out of polemics

We intend to draw attention to a topic in practical argumentation that is complex, unavoidable and of substantial consequence in social, political and economical terms: polemics. Our target is a rather frequent —and far from trivial— type of polemics, those that are generated around action proposals that affect public well-being. Our aim is to develop a framework to identify the argumentative components of an actual controversy and eventually provide means to intervene in the ongoing disputation. With that focus, in this paper we outline the basic elements of a conceptual framework that will allow us to map the topic and articulate some salient opportunities.The authors wish to acknowledge the support of SINTELNET (FET Open Coordinated Action FP7-ICT-2009-C Project No. 286370) in the writing of this paperPeer reviewe

Defeasibility from the perspective of informal logic

The notions of defeasibility and defeasible reasoning have generated a great deal of interest in various research communities. Here I want to focus on their use in logic and argumentation studies. I will approach these topics from the perspective of an informal logician who finds himself struggling with some issues that surround the idea of and the deployment of the concept of defeasibility. My intention is to make those struggles as clear as I can

Trusting the messenger because of the message: feedback dynamics from information quality to source evaluation

Published Online: 28 August 2013International audienceInformation provided by a source should be assessed by an intelligent agent on the basis of several criteria: most notably, its content and the trust one has in its source. In turn, the observed quality of information should feed back on the assessment of its source, and such feedback should intelligently distribute among different features of the source--e.g., competence and sincerity. We propose a formal framework in which trust is treated as a multi-dimensional concept relativized to the sincerity of the source and its competence with respect to specific domains: both these aspects influence the assessment of the information, and also determine a feedback on the trustworthiness degree of its source. We provide a framework to describe the combined effects of competence and sincerity on the perceived quality of information. We focus on the feedback dynamics from information quality to source evaluation, highlighting the role that uncertainty reduction and social comparison play in determining the amount and the distribution of feedback

Arguing about Trust in Multiagent Systems

Trust in multiagent systems is used for seeking to minimize the uncertainty in the interactions among the agents. In this paper, we discuss how to use argumentation to reason about trust. Using the methodology of meta-argumentation, first we represent the source of the information from which the argument is constructed in the abstract argumentation framework capturing the fact that b is attacked because b is from a particular source s. We show how a source of information can be attacked if it is not evaluated as trustworthy. Second, we provide a fine grained representation of the trust relationships between the information sources in which trust concerns not only the sources but also the single arguments and attack relations the sources propose. Moreover, we represent the evidences in support of the arguments which are put forward by the information sources and the agents can express arguments by referring to other agents’ arguments. Meta-argumentation allows us not to extend Dung’s abstract argumentation framework by introducing trust and to reuse those principles and properties defined for Dung’s framework