Archive for the ‘argumentation’ Category

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Recent publication

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Martyn Lloyd-Kelly and I have a forthcoming paper on arguing about emotions in legal cases where the ‘heat of passion’ plays a role. It appears in the proceedings of the Workshop User Models for Motivational Systems the affective and the rational routes to persuasion.

Arguing about Emotions
Martyn Lloyd-Kelly and Adam Wyner

Abstract
Emotions are commonly thought to be beyond rational analysis. In this paper, we develop the position that emotions can be the objects of argumentation and used as terms in emotional argumentation schemes. Thus, we can argue about whether or not, according to normative standards and available evidence, it is plausible that an individual had a particular emotion. This is particularly salient in legal cases, where decisions can depend on explicit arguments about emotional states.

Posted in argumentation, law, legal knowledge engineering | Comments Off

Recent Papers

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

A couple of more papers which have been accepted at upcoming conferences or workshops. The papers are all downloadable from the links provided.

Arguing with Emotion
Martyn Llloyd-Kelly and Adam Wyner
UMMS July 11, Girona, Spain

The paper at the link is a draft and will be somewhat revised for distribution at the workshop.

Abstract
Emotions are commonly thought to be beyond the pale of rational analysis, for they are subjective, may vary even with respect to the person experiencing the emotion, and may conflict with rational thought. In this paper, we develop the position that emotions can be the objects of argumentation, which we express by introducing emotion terms in emotional argumentation schemes. Thus, we can argue about whether or not, according to normative standards and available evidence, it is plausible that an individual had a particular emotion. This is particularly salient in legal cases, where decisions can depend on explicit arguments about emotional states.

On the Linguistic Analysis of Argumentation Schemes
Adam Wyner
LAGB September 7-10, Manchester, United Kingdom

This is an accepted abstract of a paper which is as yet to be written.

By Adam Wyner
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Posted in Papers, argumentation, linguistics | Comments Off

Recent Papers

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

My colleagues and I have had the papers below accepted for upcoming conferences. The papers are all downloadable from the links provided.

Towards a Structured Online Consultation Tool
Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
ePart August 2011, Deflt, The Netherlands

Abstract
The Structured Online Consultation tool (SCT) is a component tool in the IMPACT Project which is used to construct and present detailed surveys that solicit feedback from the public concerning issues in public policy. The tool is underwritten by a computational model of argumentation, incorporating fine-grained, interconnected argumentation schemes. While the public responds to easy to understand questions, the answers can be assimilated into a structured framework for analytic purposes, supporting automated reasoning about arguments and counter-arguments.

Multi-agent Based Classifi cation Using Argumentation From Experience
Maya Wardeh, Frans Coenen, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Adam Wyner
PAKDD May 2011, Shenzhen, China

Abstract
An approach to multi-agent classi fication, using an Argumentation from Experience paradigm is describe, whereby individual agents argue for a given example to be classifi ed with a particular label according to their local data. Arguments are expressed in the form of classi fication rules which are generated dynamically. The advocated argumentation process has been implemented in the PISA multi-agent framework, which is also described. Experiments indicate that the operation of PISA is comparable with other classi fication approaches and that it can be utilised for Ordinal Classifi cation and Imbalanced Class problems.

Note: I was added to this paper to present it at the conference. I’m familiar with the argumentation aspects, but the data-mining is new to me.

Semantic Models for Policy Deliberation
Katie M. Atkinson, Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, Dan Cartwright and Adam Z. Wyner
ICAIL June 2011, Pittsburgh, USA

Abstract
Semantic models have received little attention in recent years, much of their role having been taken over by developments in ontologies. Ontologies, however, are static, and so have only a limited role in reasoning about domains in which change matters. In this paper, we focus on the domain of policy deliberation, where policy decisions are designed to change things to realise particular social values. We explore how a particular kind of state transition system can be constructed to serve as a semantic model to support reasoning about alternative policy decisions. The policy making process includes stages that support the construction of a model, which can then be exploited in reasoning. The reasoning itself will be driven by a particular argumentation scheme for practical reasoning, and the ways in which arguments based on this scheme can be attacked and evaluated. The evaluation provides alternative policy positions. The semantics underpin a current web-based implementation, designed to solicit structured feedback on policy proposals.

Towards Formalising Argumentation about Legal Cases
Adam Z. Wyner, Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, Katie M. Atkinson
ICAIL June 2011, Pittsburgh, USA

Abstract
In this paper we offer an account of reasoning with legal cases in terms of argumentation schemes. These schemes, and undercutting attacks associated with them, are expressed as defeasible rules of inference that will lend themselves to formalisation within the ASPIC+ framework. We begin by modelling the style of reasoning with cases developed by Aleven and Ashley in the CATO project, which describes cases using factors, and then extend the account to accommodate the dimensions used in Rissland and Ashley’s earlier HYPO project. Some additional scope for argumentation is then identified and formalised.

By Adam Wyner
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Posted in IMPACT Project, Papers, argumentation, case-based reasoning, e-Government | Comments Off

Workshop on Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning at ICCBR Sept 12-15, 2011

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

Call for Papers

Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning (ACBR 2011)

September 12, 2011

A workshop at

ICCBR 2011: The International Conference on Case-based Reasoning, September 12-15, 2011
Greenwich, London, United Kingdom

Overview:
Case-based reasoning is standardly formalised as having four-steps – retrieve, reuse, revise, and retain. In this formalisation, there is little scope for debate. However, in domains such as law, medicine, and product selection, participants (lawyers, doctors, or consumers) may argue for or against a given legal determination, clinical treatment plan, or product choice based on what is retrieved from the case base, how the cases are reused, and what revisions are made to a case. The participants must not only justify their argument, but also defend it against counter-arguments; as well, subsidiary arguments must be justified and defended. Moreover, the information in the case base may be incomplete; different individuals to the dispute may hold alternative views, values, or consumer-oriented goals; and the reasoning itself may only be plausible rather than certain. Given this, we resort to defeasible argumentation on information derived from the case base, where claims only presumptively follow from premises and reasoning about the overall ‘network’ of arguments can be related to alternative contexts or audiences. At the end of the reasoning process, some decision must be made, which may vary depending on audiences.

Recent research on formalising or supporting decision-making in social systems (law, medicine, consumer discussion websites) shows the crucial role of argumentation in structuring, clarifying, and reasoning with respect to complex, possibly inconsistent information. Bringing researchers together to discuss results across domains will lead to greater understanding of commonalities or problems and forward state-of-the-art research on the intersection of and interaction between case-based reasoning and argumentation.

Intended Audence
Researchers working on Argumentation and CBR in any theoretical approach and application domain (Law, Medicine, Web-based consumer sites, Games, etc).

Areas of Interest (preliminary):

  • Relationships between case-bases and argumentation such as argumentation schemes that are designed for particular domains.
  • The content and structure of the case-base as required by participants to the argument.
  • Examples examples and applications of case-based argumentative reasoning.

    • Author Guidelines:
    The workshop solicits full papers and position papers. As well as fully-developed, thoroughly evaluated research, authors are welcome to submit tentative, incremental, and exploratory studies. Papers not accepted as full papers may be accepted as short research abstracts. Submissions will be evaluated by the program committee. Papers should be submitted in LNCS format, with a maximum of 10 pages. Camera-ready copies of papers have to be ready on the 25 of July 2011 (hard deadline) so that they can be included in the workshop proceedings.

    Submissions should be submitted electronically in PDF to the EasyChair site by the deadline (see important dates below). As it stands now, you submit the paper via ICCBR submission page on EasyChair, submitting the paper to Workshop 6: Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning.

    Publication:
    Papers will appear in the proceedings of the conference workshops. Further details about publication are to follow.

    Webpages:
    ICCBR
    Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning

    Important Dates:
    Paper submission deadline: 27 June 2011 by 00:00 GMT
    Acceptance notification sent: 06 July 2011
    Final camera-ready version deadline: 5 August 2011
    Workshop date: 12 September 2011

    Contact Information:
    Primary contact: Adam Wyner, adam@wyner.info

    Program Committee Co-Chairs:
    Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK)
    Trevor Bench-Capon (University of Liverpool, UK)

    Program Committee (preliminary):
    Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh
    Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool
    Frans Coenen, University of Liverpool
    Mehmet Goker, PriceWaterhouseCoopers
    Nancy Green, University of North Carolina
    Stella Heras, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
    Cindy Marling, Ohio University
    David McSherry, University of Ulster
    Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts
    Maya Wardeh, University of Liverpool

    Posted in argumentation, case-based reasoning | Comments Off

    Presentation at tGov on the IMPACT Project

    Thursday, March 24th, 2011

    On March 18, 2011, I gave a presentation at tGov 2011 on the IMPACT Project.

    The idea behind “transformational government” (or t-government) is that new technologies will change the way that the public interacts with the operation and delivery of public services, which are web-based, joined-up, citizen-centric than in the past. See, for example, Directgov, the website for the UK government. The IMPACT Project, which relates to how public policy is made, clearly addresses some of these issues.

    Follow the links for the slides of the talk A Structured Online Consultation Tool and the paper Towards a Structured Online Consultation Tool.

    Posted in IMPACT Project, argumentation, e-Government | Comments Off

    Argumentation for Public-Policy Making – Presentation at the Central Office of Information, United Kingdom

    Thursday, March 24th, 2011

    In October, 2010, I made a presentation on the various elements of the IMPACT Project, which aims to apply computational models of argumentation to support public-policy making, at the Central Office of Information (COI) in London, United Kingdom. The COI is the UK government’s center for marketing and communications. It works with government departments (on a contract basis) to inform and engage citizens in issues that affect their lives. The COI is under the Minister for the Cabinet Office.

    This was an interesting opportunity to learn more about how the UK government gathers and delivers information to the public.

    For my part, on behalf of the IMPACT Project, I was outlining the several tools which could be used to support public-policy making. I outlined several of the current tools (some of which are used by the COI), their limitations, and some of the advantages that would be gained from the IMPACT tools. The slides are IMPACT Project Presentation at the Central Office of Information.

    Since that meeting (the second), I’ve been in touch with Suzannah Kinsella, Head of Public Engagement at the COI. However, the UK government has been under some reorganisation and review (see links under Review into Government Communications). Work from the IMPACT Project may be a useful part of this. In early April I shall again meet with her and another colleague at the COI to see how we can specifically move ahead in collaborating with the COI on development of the tools.

    Posted in argumentation, e-Government | Comments Off

    Computational Argumentation on the Web with Natural Language

    Sunday, May 16th, 2010

    Over the last four years, I have been working on topics related to computational argumentation on the web using natural language. Some of my publications and previous postings reflect these interests. Along with my colleague Tom van Engers, I prepared two research proposals on this topic, which are here presented as technical reports of our work. These reports are also relevant to the current IMPACT project, which addresses many of the same themes.

    There is a short paper (five pages) which outlines key ideas, but has little in the way of discussion or background discussion. There is a long paper (28 pages) which goes into the proposal in much more depth.

    Comments and discussion on these documents are very welcome.

    By Adam Wyner
    Distributed under the Creative Commons
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    Posted in argumentation, controlled natural language, legal knowledge engineering, linguistics | Comments Off

    Research Fellow at University of Leeds

    Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

    On May 4, I’m taking up a research fellow position. I’ll continue to work on the IMPACT Project:

    IMPACT will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level.

    I’ll be based at the University of Leeds, Institute of Communication Studies, in the Centre for Digital Citizenship:

    The CdC’s mission is to promote outstanding research on the changing nature of citizenship in a digitally networked society and to contribute to the analysis and development of policy in this area.

    I’ll be working with Ann Macintosh:

    My research agenda falls within two main socio-technical areas of interest. The first concerns the societal effect of technology on governance processes and the development of an evaluation framework for eParticipation. This area of my research is providing high-level insights into the mechanisms that need to be built into future online participation systems to appreciate how, where and why people use them. My second research area is the support for citizen engagement in policy making and the provision of public agency information and knowledge. Here the focus is on the use of Web 2.0 and computer supported argumentation systems to support deliberation and knowledge sharing.

    Looking forward to working on these topics!

    By Adam Wyner
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    Posted in argumentation, e-Government, news | 2 Comments »

    Recent Paper Submissions

    Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

    During my time at the Leibniz Center for Law working on the IMPACT, I and my colleagues Tom van Engers and Kiavash Bahreini prepared and submitted three papers to conferences and workshops. The drafts of the papers are linked below along with the abstracts. Comments welcome.

    A Framework for Enriched, Controlled On-line Discussion Forums for e-Government Policy-making
    Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers
    Submitted to eGOV 2010

    Abstract
    The paper motivates and proposes a framework for enriched on-line discussion forums for e-government policy-making, where pro and con statements for positions are structured, recorded, represented, and evaluated. The framework builds on current technologies for multi-threaded discussion lists by integrating modes, natural language processing, ontologies, and formal argumentation frameworks. With modes other than the standard reply “comment”, users specify the semantic relationship between a new statement and the previous statement; the result is an argument graph. Natural language processing with a controlled language constrains the domain of discourse, eliminates ambiguity and unclarity, allows a logical representation of statements, and facilitates information extraction. However, the controlled language is highly expressive and natural . Ontologies represent the knowledge of the domain. Argumentation frameworks evaluate the argument graph and generate sets of consistent statements. The output of the system is a rich and articulated representation of a set of policy statements which supports queries, information extraction, and inference

    From Policy-making Statements to First-order Logic
    Adam Wyner, Tom van Engers, and Kiavash Bahreini
    Submitted to eGOVIS 2010

    Abstract
    Within a framework for enriched on-line discussion forums for e-government policy-making, pro and con statements for positions are input, structurally related, then logically represented and evaluated. The framework builds on current technologies for multi-threaded discussion, natural language processing, ontologies, and formal argumentation frameworks. This paper focuses on the natural language processing of statements in the framework. A small sample policy discussion is presented. We adopt and apply a controlled natural language (Attempto Controlled English) to constrain the domain of discourse, eliminate ambiguity and unclarity, allow a logical representation of statements which supports inference and consistency checking, and facilitate information extraction. Each of the polity statements is automatically translated into rst-order logic. The result is logical representation of the policy discussion which we can query, draw inferences (given ground statements), test for consistency, and extract detailed information.

    Towards Web-base Mass Argumentation in Natural Language
    Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers
    Submitted to EKAW 2010

    Abstract
    Within the artificial intelligence community, argumentation has been studied for quite some years now. Despite progress, the field has not yet succeeded in creating support tools that members of the public could use to contribute their views to discussions of public policy. One important reason for that is that the input statements of participants in policy-making discussions are put forward in natural language, while translating the statements into the formal models used by argumentation scientists is cumbersome. These formal models can be used to automatically reason with, query, or transmit domain knowledge using web-based technologies. Making this knowledge explicit, formal, and expressed in a language which a machine can process is a labour, time, and knowledge intensive task. To make such translation and it requires expertise that most participants in policy-making debates do not have. In this paper we describe an approach with which we aim at contributing to a solution of this knowledge acquisition bottle-neck. We propose a novel, integrated methodology and framework which adopts and adapts existing technologies. We use semantic wikis which support mass, collaborative, distributive, dynamic knowledge acquisition. In particular, ACEWiki incorporates NLP tools, enabling linguistically competent users to enter their knowledge in natural language, while yielding a logical form that is suitable for automated processing. In the paper we will explain how we can extend the ACEWiki and augment it with argumentation tools which elicit knowledge from users, making implicit information explicit, and generate subsets of consistent knowledge bases from inconsistent knowledge bases. To a set of consistent propositions, we can apply automated reasoners, allowing users to draw inferences and make queries. The methodology and framework take a fragmentary, incremental development approach to knowledge acquisition in complex domains.

    By Adam Wyner
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    Posted in argumentation, controlled natural language, e-Government, legal knowledge engineering | 2 Comments »

    The IMPACT Project — first two days

    Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

    As I mentioned in a previous post, I am working in Amsterdam for the next three months on setting up a research project at the Leibniz Center for Law. The focus here is to develop information extract of textual debates (using GATE) and a tool for inputting debates in a structured manner that can be further processed for reasoning.

    The official IMPACT Project information on CORDIS.

    As part of my contribution, I have two draft papers, written in the spring and summer of 2009, which will be further developed at Leibniz: From Arguments in Natural Language to Argumentation Frameworks and Multi-modal Multi-threaded Online Forums. While these are early drafts of papers and not for wider circulation, they give a good indication of the line of thinking and of some of the key ideas we will be pursuing. Comments about these works are very welcome.

    By Adam Wyner
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    Posted in argumentation, controlled natural language, e-Government | Comments Off

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