Category: argumentation

BiCi Seminar "Frontiers and Connections between Argumentation Theory and Natural Language Processing"

Bertinoro, Italy
Date
July 20th-25th, 2014
Location
Bertinoro International Center for Informatics (BiCi)
Bertinoro, Italy
The seminar will be held in the BiCi, which is located in the small medieval hilltop town of Bertinoro, Italy, about 50km east of Bologna. The town is picturesque. Meetings are held in an archiepiscopal castle that has been converted into a modern conference center.
Context
Large amounts of text are added to the Web daily from social media, web-based commerce, scientific papers, eGovernment consultations, etc. Such texts are used to make decisions in the sense that people read the texts, carry out some informal analysis, and then (in the best case) make a decision; for example, a consumer might read the comments on an Amazon website about a camera before deciding what camera to buy. The problem is that the information is distributed, unstructured, and not cumulative. In addition, the argument structure – justifications for a claim and criticisms – might be implicit or explicit within some document, but harder to discern across documents. The sheer volume of information overwhelms users. Given all these problems, reasoning about arguments on the web is currently infeasible.
A solution to these problems would be to develop tools to aggregate, synthesize, structure, summarize, and reason about arguments in texts. Such tools would enable users to search for particular topics and their justifications, trace through the argument (justifications for justifications and so on), as well as to systematically and formally reason about the graph of arguments. By doing so, a user would have a better, more systematic basis for making a decision. However, deep, manual analysis of texts is time-consuming, knowledge intensive, and thus unscalable. To acquire, generate, and transmit the arguments, we need scalable machine-based or machine-supported approaches to extract arguments. The application of tools to mine arguments would be very broad and deep given the variety of contexts where arguments appear and the purposes they are put to.
On the one hand, text analysis is a promising approach to identify and extract arguments from text, receiving attention from the natural language processing community. For example, there are approaches on argumentation mining of legal documents, on-line debates, product reviews, newspaper articles, court cases, scientific articles, and other areas. On the other hand, computational models of argumentation have made substantial progress in providing abstract, formal models to represent and reason over complex argumentation graphs. The literature covers alternative models, a range of semantics, complexity, and formal dialogues. Yet, there needs to be progress not only within each domain, but in bridging between textual and abstract representations of argument so as to enable reasoning from source text.
To make progress and realize automated argumentation, a range of interdisciplinary approaches, skills, and collaborations are required, covering natural language processing technology, linguistic theories of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse, domain knowledge such as law and science, computer science techniques in artificial intelligence, argumentation theory, and computational models of argumentation.
Objectives and Outcomes
The objective of the seminar is to gather an interdisciplinary group of scholars together for an extended, collaborative discussion about the various aspects of connecting argumentation and natural language processing. The intended outcome of the seminar is a roadmap that outlines the state-of-the art, identifies key problems and issues, and suggests approaches to addressing them. More precisely, theseminar is conceived for the writing of a monograph “A Prospective View of Argumentation Theory and Natural Language Processing” that should become a standard reference in the field and should provide guidelines for future research by putting that activity in focus and identify the most significant research issues in combining these two research fields. This roadmap will have several sections authored by the participants at the seminar and edited by the seminar organizers.
Format and Process
The seminar will adopt a structure, where personal interaction and open discussion are prominent, emphasizing discussion of results, ideas, sketches, works in progress, and open problems. Participants will be requested to prepare individual contributions around specific topics (see a tentative list below) so that the outcome of the workshop will constitute a roadmap for the area to be published in the near future. The allocation of topics as well as the mechanism for compiling and elaborating contributions into a coherent draft — that will form the working document for the workshop — will be made known in a future communication to those individuals who accept to participate in this workshop.
Currently we have identified the following areas of research to be presented for discussion at the workshop (and we welcome suggestions about additional topics):

  • Automatic identification of argument elements and relationships between arguments in a document;
  • Argumentation and negation & contrariness;
  • Argumentation and discourse;
  • Argumentation and dialogue;
  • Approaches combining NLP methods and argumentation frameworks;
  • Creation/evaluation of high quality annotated natural language corpora to prove argumentative models on naturally occurring data, or to train automatic systems on tasks related to argumentation (e.g. arguments detection).
  • Applications of argumentation mining: summarization, extraction, visualization, retrieval;

Organizers
Elena Cabrio
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Mediterranee, France
elena.cabrio@inria.fr
http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Elena.Cabrio
Serena Villata
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Mediterranee, France
serena.villata@inria.fr
http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Serena.Villata
Adam Wyner
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
azwyner@abdn.ac.uk
http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware
Structure of Position Paper Submissions
Participants will be expected to submit position papers (with references) prior to the seminar. Submissions details will be discussed over the course of the seminar. The seminar organizers will facilitate a fruitful exchange of ideas and information in order to integrate the discussion topics.
Position papers should follow the two-column format of ACL 2014 proceedings without exceeding eight (6) pages of content plus two extra pages for references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files. Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in the ACL style files, and they must be in PDF.
Subsequent to the seminar, draft roadmap documents will be circulated amongst the participants for further discussion and prior to submission for publication. We plan to publish the roadmap in a volume of the CEUR workshop proceedings series. In addition, we have a journal that has agreed to publish a special issue based on expanded and revised versions of the material presented at the workshop.
Organizational Issues
The total registration fees for each person for the whole stay (arrival Sunday evening – departure Friday after lunch) are 600 Euro. Participants pay their own costs; however, organizers are seeking funding to defray the expenses. We will update as information becomes available. Fees include seminar registration, accommodation, WiFi and meals (included an excursion and the social dinner).
BiCi Registration
Shortlink

Auxiliary Materials for COMMA 2014 Submission

This page is a ‘stub’ for the paper, presentation, additional graphics, discussion, and implementation for:
An Isomorphic Encoding of Propositional Calculus as an Argumentation Framework
Adam Wyner and Federico Cerutti
Under review
Abstract
The paper introduces AF_PC, which directly encodes the Propositional Calculus (PC) as a graph in a Dungian argumentation framework (AF) without instantiating arguments of PC as abstract arguments and without acceptability conditions. The truth tables of PC statements isomorphically correlate to stable extensions of the AF_PC. We translate PC formulae to AF_PC, give the semantics, and discuss logical consequence. Thus, we can reason in PC using the AF_PC as a computational model even in the face of inconsistent knowledge bases. AF_PC is thoroughly defined, and the isomorphism is proven.
Presentation
Graphics
Implementation
Federico Cerutti has written an implementation that translates formulae of PC into an AF_PC graph. This implementation is available HERE.
Shortlink to this page.

Paper in ArgMAS 2013 Post-proceedings

I’m co-author of a paper in a post-workshop proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2012) June 4-8, Valencia, Spain.
A Functional Perspective on Argumentation Schemes
Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
Abstract
In multi-agent systems (MAS), abstract argumentation and argumentation schemes are increasingly important. To be useful, schemes require a computational approach so that agents can use the components of a scheme to construct and present arguments and counterarguments. This paper proposes a syntactic analysis that integrates argumentation schemes with abstract argumentation. Schemes can be analysed into the roles that propositions play in each scheme and the structure of the associated propositions, yielding a greater understanding of the schemes, a uniform method of analysis, and a systematic means to relate one scheme to another. This analysis of the schemes helps to clarify what is needed to provide denotations of the terms and predicates in a semantic model.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerABCArgMASPost2013,
author = {Adam Wyner and Atkinson, Katie and Trevor Bench-Capon},
title = {A Functional Perspective on Argumentation Schemes},
booktitle = {Post-Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems ({ArgMAS} 2013)},
year = {2013},
editor = {Peter McBurney and Parsons, Simon and Iyad Rahwan},
pages = {??-??}
}
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Paper in CMNA 2010 Post-proceedings

I’m co-author of a paper in a post-workshop proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument in 2010 and 2011.
Working on the Argument Pipeline: Through Flow Issues between Natural Language Argument, Instantiated Arguments, and Argumentation Frameworks
Adam Wyner, Tom van Engers, and Anthony Hunter
Abstract
In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g. natural language, and forms which can be automatically processed; second, reasoning with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the knowledge. Given such complexities, it is labour and knowledge intensive to conduct policy consultations, where participants contribute statements to the policy discourse. Yet, from such a consultation, we want to derive policy positions, where each position is a set of consistent statements, but where positions may be mutually inconsistent. To address these problems and support policy-making consultations, we consider recent automated techniques in natural language processing, instantiating arguments, and reasoning with the arguments in argumentation frameworks. We discuss application and “bridge” issues between these techniques, outlining a pipeline of technologies whereby: expressions in a controlled natural language are parsed and translated into a logic (a literals and rules knowledge base), from which we generate instantiated arguments and their relationships using a logic-based formalism (an argument knowledge base), which is then input to an implemented argumentation framework that calculates extensions of arguments (an argument extensions knowledge base), and finally, we extract consistent sets of expressions (policy positions). The paper reports progress towards reasoning with web-based, distributed, collaborative, incomplete, and inconsistent knowledge bases expressed in natural language.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerVanEngersHunterCMNAPOST2013,
author = {Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers and Anthony Hunter},
title = {Working on the Argument Pipeline: Through Flow Issues between Natural
Language Argument, Instantiated Arguments, and Argumentation Frameworks},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument},
year = {2013},
editor = {??},
pages = {??-??},
note = {To appear}
}
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Paper in CLIMA XIV Special Session on Argumentation

I’m co-author of a paper in the special session on argumentation at The 14th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, Corunna, Spain, September 16-18, 2013.
La Coruna Photos
This photo of La Coruna courtesy of TripAdvisor
On the Instantiation of Knowledge Bases in Abstract Argumentation Frameworks
Adam Wyner, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Paul Dunne
Abstract
Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) provide a fruitful basis for exploring issues of defeasible reasoning. Their power largely derives from the abstract nature of the arguments within the framework, where arguments are atomic nodes in an undifferentiated relation of attack. This abstraction conceals different conceptions of argument, and concrete instantiations encounter difficulties as a result of conflating these conceptions. We distinguish three distinct senses of the term. We provide an approach to instantiating AFs in which the nodes are restricted to literals and rules, encoding the underlying theory directly. Arguments, in each of the three senses, then emerge from this framework as distinctive structures of nodes and paths. Our framework retains the theoretical and computational benefits of an abstract AF, while keeping notions distinct which are conflated in other approaches to instantiation.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerBench-CaponDunne2013,
author = {Adam Wyner and Trevor Bench-Capon and Paul Dunne},
title = {On the Instantiation of Knowledge Bases in Abstract Argumentation Frameworks},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 14th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems},
year = {2013},
publisher = {Springer},
series = {LNCS},
pages = {??-??},
note = {To appear}
}
Presentation slides for “On the Instantiation of Knowledge Bases in Abstract Argumentation Frameworks”
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Argumentation and Linguistics Tutorial at ACAI 2013

I presented a tutorial on Argumentation and Linguistics at the Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI 2013) held at the Department of Informatics, King’s College London. The course focussed on Argumentation and Artificial Intelligence. From the description:

The ACAI Summer School 2013 (ACAI 2013) will be held at at King’s College London, UK, from the 1st July to the 5th July 2013 and is on the topic of Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. Computational models of argument, and the development of agreement technologies, is becoming an important area in artificial intelligence. The aim of the summer school is to provide the attendees with a solid grounding in the basic ideas in formal modelling of argumentation, dialogue, and negotiation. Furthermore, there will be a programme of lectures on application areas, lab sessions on software developments, and lectures linking with areas in AI and beyond.

There were about 40 students in attendance. The ACAI course on argumentation covered a good, broad range of topics, presented by my european colleagues. The core of the programme consisted of four main speakers who gave 6 hours of lectures:

  • Pietro Baroni (Università degli Studi di Brescia) on Abstract Argumentation
  • Philippe Besnard (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) on Logic-Based Argumentation
  • Nicolas Maudet (University Pierre et Marie Curie) on Negotiation
  • Simon Parsons (University of Liverpool) on Dialogue

There were also presentations on applications of argumentation and agreement technologies:

  • Leila Amgoud (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) on Argumentation in Decision-Making
  • Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool) on Argumentation in eGovernment
  • John Fox (University of Oxford) on Argumentation in Medicine
  • Nir Oren (University of Aberdeen) on Argumentation in Planning
  • Henry Prakken (Utrecht University) on Argumentation in Law
  • Chris Reed (University of Dundee) on Argumentation on the Web
  • Stefan Woltran (Vienna University of Technology) on Implementation of Argumentation
  • Adam Wyner (University of Aberdeen) on Argumentation and Linguistics

The slides of my talk are available on the link:
Argumentation and Linguistics
Adam Wyner
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By Adam Wyner

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ICAIL 2013 Papers

I’m co-author of three papers at The 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013), Rome, Italy, The Netherlands.
Il Colloseo, Rome, Italy
OASIS LegalRuleML
Tara Athan, Harold Boley, Guido Governatori, Monica Palmirani, Adrian Paschke, Adam Wyner
Abstract
In this paper we present the motivation, use cases, design principles, abstract syntax, and initial core of LRML. The LRML core is sufficiently rich for expressing legal sources, time, defeasibility, and deontic operators. An example is provided. LRML is compared to related work.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{AthanEtAl2013,
author = {Tara Athan and Harold Boley and Guido Governatori and Monica Palmirani and Adrian Paschke and Adam Wyner},
title = {{OASIS} {L}egal{R}ule{ML}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013)},
year = {2013},
pages = {3-12},
address = {Rome, Italy}
}
Argument Schemes for Reasoning with Legal Cases Using Values
Trevor Bench-Capon, Henry Prakken, Adam Wyner, and Katie Atkinson
Abstract
Argument schemes can provide a means of explicitly describing reasoning methods in a form that lends itself to computation. The reasoning required to distinguish cases in the manner of CATO has been previously captured as a set of argument schemes. Here we present argument schemes that encapsulate another way of reasoning with cases: using preferences between social values revealed in past decisions to decide cases which have no exact matching precedents when the cases are described in terms of factors. We provide a set of schemes, with variations to capture different ways of comparing sets and varying degrees of promotion of values; we formalise these schemes; and we illustrate them with some examples.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{BenchCaponPrakkenWynerAtkinsonValueCBR2013,
author = {Trevor Bench-Capon and Henry Prakken and Adam Wyner and Katie Atkinson},
title = {Argument Schemes for Reasoning about Legal Cases},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013)},
year = {2013},
pages = {13-22},
address = {Rome, Italy}
}
Argumentation Based Tools for Policy-Making
Maya Wardeh, Adam Wyner, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Katie Atkinson
Abstract
Short paper, so no abstract.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WardehWynerAtkinsonBenchCaponDemos2013,
author = {Maya Wardeh and Adam Wyner and Trevor Bench-Capon and Katie Atkinson},
title = {Argumentation Based Tools for Policy-Making},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013)},
year = {2013},
pages = {249-250},
address = {Rome, Italy}
}
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Psychological Studies of Policy Reasoning

The New York Times had an article on the difficulties that the public has to understand complex policy proposals – I’m Right (For Some Reason). The points in the article relate directly to the research I’ve been doing at Liverpool on the IMPACT Project, for we decompose a policy proposal into its constituent parts for examination and improved understanding. See our tool live: Structured Consultation Tool
Policy proposals are often presented in an encapsulated form (a sound bite). And those receiving it presume that they understand it, the illusion of explanatory depth discussed in a recent article by Frank Keil (a psychology professor at Cornell when and where I was a Linguistics PhD student). This is the illusion where people believe they understand a complex phenomena with greater precision, coherence, and depth than they actually do; they overestimate their understanding. To philosophers, this is hardly a new phenomena, but showing it experimentally is a new result.
In research about public policy, the NY Times authors, Sloman and Fernbach, describe experiments where people state a position and then had to justify it. The results showed that participants softened their views as a result, for their efforts to justify it highlighted the limits of their understanding. Rather than statements of policy proposals, they suggest:

Instead, we voters need to be more mindful that issues are complicated and challenge ourselves to break down the policy proposals on both sides into their component parts. We have to then imagine how these ideas would work in the real world — and then make a choice: to either moderate our positions on policies we don’t really understand, as research suggests we will, or try to improve our understanding.

Breaking down policy proposals into component parts for further investigation and understanding is exactly what we’ve been doing in the IMPACT Project.
This article and the references to further literature are not only intrinsically interesting, but they also give me additional ways of thinking about these issues and an evaluative paradigm for our tools.

Presentation at Conference on Agreement Technologies

I participated in the 1st International Conference on Agreement Technologies in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The talk, Arguing from a Point of View, addresses the issue of extracting argumentative information from web-based information sources such as consumer product reviews or recommendations. Jodi Schneider is a co-author. The paper is available on the previous post. Some of the topics are developed further in our paper at SWAIE 2012.
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By Adam Wyner

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Paper at SWAIE 2012

A paper with Jodi Schneider accepted to 1st Workshop on Semantic Web and Information Extraction (SWAIE 2012) held at the 18th Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Galway, Ireland.
Identifying Consumers’ Arguments in Text
Jodi Schneider and Adam Wyner
Abstract
Product reviews are a corpus of textual data on consumer opinions. While reviews can be sorted by rating, there is limited support to search in the corpus for statements about particular topics, e.g. properties of a product. Moreover, where opinions are justified or criticised, statements in the corpus indicate arguments and counterarguments. Explicitly structuring these statements into arguments could help better understand customers’ disposition towards a product. We present a semi-automated, rule-based information extraction tool to support the identification of statements and arguments in a corpus, using: argumentation schemes; user, domain, and sentiment terminology; and discourse indicators.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerSchneiderSWAIE2012,
author = {Jodi Schneider and Adam Wyner},
title = {Identifying Consumers’ Arguments in Text},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semantic Web and Information Extraction (SWAIE 2012)},
year = {2012},
address = {Galway, Ireland},
note = {To appear}}
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By Adam Wyner

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.