Bottom-up argumentation

Citation: Francesca Toni and Paolo Torroni (2011) Bottom-up argumentation. First International Workshop on the Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Bottom-up argumentation
Download: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ft/PAPERS/tafaPT.pdf
Tagged: Computer Science (RSS) Facebook (RSS), online argumentation (RSS), abductive reasoning (RSS), Assumption-Based Argumentation (RSS)

Summary

Turns a Facebook discussion into a logical representation, based on the concepts of comments, opinions, and links. Opinions are "meta-level comments" extracted from what people say directly in comments, while links represent the relationships. There are three key relationships: that a comment is "supportedBy" something, that an opinion or link is "basedOn", and that there is an "objection" between two things.

The representation used is Assumption-Based Argumentation (see e.g. Assumption-Based Argumentation), a general-purpose argumentation framework (e.g. formal model), presumably chosen due to the importance of abductive reasoning in this endeavor.

They provide a graph (page 15) which uses continuous lines to represent basedOn/supportedBy links/relations, which are given as e.g. link(l_1_1,o1,c1) in the model; meanwhile dashed lines in the graph represent objection links/relations which are given as e.g. alink(l_4_17,o4,p17) in the model.

This allows them to check the "dialectic validity" using the semantics of Assumption-Based Argumentation.

Background knowledge

• Dung, P. M., Kowalski, R., and Toni, F. Assumption-Based Argumentation. In Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence edited by I. Rahwan and G. Simari) Springer, 2009. preprint

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Turns a Facebook discussion thread into a logical representation.