Prof. Guillermo Simari from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahia Blanca, Argentina is visiting us today. He will be delivering a seminar entitled Modeling the Accrual of Arguments in Defeasible Logic Programming at noon in Wolfson. All are welcome.

The new, EPSRC-funded Dialectical Argumentation Machines project is recruiting its first team member, a PhD student. The advertisement is now available.

Argument in AI has had a dedicated workshop series in CMNA since 2001; argument in MAS has had its own forum, ArgMAS since 2004. The community as a whole has had the COMMA conference series since 2006. But folk have had to publish in an enormous variety of journals, often through special issues dedicated to argumentation. Finally, a new journal has been established to support the growing community. It is published by Taylor and Francis, who have a strong track record in both humanities and sciences, and have worked with interdisciplinary areas such as ours before. The new journal, Argument & Computation, is now open for business.

EPSRC has announced that it is funding a major new project exploring the deployment of argumentation technologies in online environments. The £0.6m initiative will use the AIF standard as a cornerstone, and will partner with high-impact online providers to deliver live systems based on computational models of philosophical argumentation theory. The Dialectical Argumentation Machines project will look at the monologue-dialogue link and the relationship between abstract and concrete argumentation in order to build systems that can bridge the gap between everyday argument and formal techniques.

The abstract of the project is available from the EPSRC, and the project has a new home page.

Helena Lindgren from the Computer Science Department at the University of Umeå is visiting the group this week to find out more about what we have been doing, and to kick off a collaboration for which she has won funding from VINNOVA, the Swedish funding council. Helena has experience of building decision support systems in healthcare, with prototypes running in Sweden, Korea and Japan, and she is now working to integrate argumentation structured around AIF representations into those systems.

Phew. The reviewing season is in full flow, and with ever more events in the argumentation world, it’s getting to be hard work! It’s interesting to note them as a way of seeing how things are progressing. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been reviewing for:

• AAMAS 2009 (which has Argumentation as one of its keywords again)
• IJCAI 2009 (which has Argumentation has one of its keywords for the first time)
• The 2nd Persuasive Technology Symposium at AISB 2009
• ArgMAS 2009 at AAMAS
• CMNA 2009 at IJCAI

And this is an ‘off’ year: next year there’s COMMA and ISSA too.

A new monograph on Argumentation Schemes co-authored by Doug Walton (Windsor), Fabrizio Macagno (Milan) and Chris Reed, and published by CUP is now out and available.

This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes.

Bart Verheij, from the AI department at the University of Groningen is visiting us for a couple of days. He is delivering a seminar on Waking Up from the Logical Dream, Or: Argumentation as a Content-Driven Activity at 12 noon today in Wolfson.

Waking Up from the Logical Dream, Or: Argumentation as a Content-Driven Activity - Bart Verheij

Imagine yourself being in court, having to defend your innocence of a serious crime. Let’s suppose that your defense fails, and you end up behind bars. Was it your - probably imperfect - control of the logic of argumentation that made you lose? Or, was the problem more a matter of content, for instance, your unconvincing alibi, or lack of knowledge of the law?

This talk will use the recent advances in the logic of argumentation as a starting point, continuing to the hard issue of understanding how much logic is helpful for argumentation. In the talk, the issue is addressed from the perspectives of argumentation software and of argumentation schemes. It will become clear that Toulmin’s research agenda (dating from the 1950s) is still relevant.

Prof. Andrew Ravenscroft from the Learning Technology Research Institute at London Metropolitan University is visiting the group today. He will be delivering a seminar entitled, The thinking web? Designing tools and mashups for cyber-argumentation today at 12 noon in Wolfson.

This talk will review over a decade of design-based research that has: investigated the relationship between argumentation and thinking in learning contexts; and, designed digital tools that model argumentation and support its practice. This Learning Sciences approach to learning interaction design centres around the notion of ‘dialogue games’. This is a paradigm that can be used analytically or prescriptively to further or understanding of dialectical dialogue processes and how these can be

modelled and promoted for educational purposes.

The talk will emphasise: our work in applied computational linguistics that originally investigated and modelled educational argumentation; the design and evaluation of deployable dialogue game tools, on a relatively large-scale, that arose out of the computational modelling; and, present

our ongoing work that is synthesising dialogue game technologies and ideas with SOA and social software approaches – to realise accessible and widespread mashups, or ‘eco-systems’, for cyber-argumentation.

Finally, I will reflect on and open up the discussion about where this work might be taking us in terms of future web-technologies and related digital practices, reflecting on questions such as “What sort of

thinking do we need, by man and machines, in the 21C?”

There is a small meeting tomorrow at the Computer Science Department at the University of Liverpool on Argument and Evidence, organised by Floris Bex. It forms a part of Henry Prakken, Gerard Vreeswijk and Bart Verheij’s Making Sense of Evidence project, on which Chris is a consultant. Chris has been invited to give a talk there on “Argument schemes in monologue and dialogue”. The monologic/dialogic link is one which the ARG group at Dundee is particularly focused on right now, building on a paper by Chris and Doug Walton from OSSA 2007, and the more recent AIF+ paper presented at COMMA. Tomorrow will be an opportunity to explore these ideas in an evidential context.