The Call for Papers for the 10th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument was made available this week. CMNA X will be colocated with ECAI in Lisbon in August 2010. The deadline for long papers is 9 May 2010, and for short papers is 6 June 2010. Paper submissions will be handled through the easychair site for the workshop. More details at www.cmna.info/CMNA10.
Chris is giving a course on argumentation technology today at the Swiss doctoral programme on argumentation, Argupolis, at USI Lugano. The course is a partner to Douglas Walton‘s earlier course on argumentation tools. The summary for the course is available here.
OVA alpha 2 is the latest release of OVA, ARG:dundee’s drag-and-drop interface for analysing textual arguments.
What’s New in OVA alpha 2:
Issues fixed in this release:
OVA can be found at http://ova.computing.dundee.ac.uk
As ever, we welcome your feedback.
Liz Black who is currently at the University of Oxford working in the COSSAC group, is visiting us today. She is delivering a seminar:
Agreeing how to act
When deliberating about what to do, an autonomous agent must generate and consider the relative pros and cons of the different available options. The situation becomes even more complicated when multiple agents are involved in a joint deliberation, as each agent will have its own preferred outcome and this may change as new information is received from the other participating agents. This talk considers such joint deliberation through the use of argumentation techniques.
I will present a dialogue system that allows agents to come to an agreement about how to act in order to achieve a joint goal. During such a dialogue, an agent can use its perception of others in order to select arguments that it believes are likely to be particularly persuasive. I will discuss how an agent may develop a model of what is important to another agent and how it can then use this model to guide its dialogue behaviour.
The seminar will be in Wolfson as usual at noon.
Floris is today giving a talk at an eSad workshop “Understanding Image-based Evidence” in Oxford. In his presentation he discusses how argumentation theory can be used by scholars that analyse ancient texts. He is also offering a sneek preview of how an argument structure modelled in OVA can be dialogically analysed with our new Google Wave App (developed by John Lawrence).
Floris today successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Evidence for a Good Story: A Hybrid Theory of Arguments, Stories and Criminal Evidence in Groningen, the Netherlands. His thesis work was supervised by Henry Prakken, Bart Verheij and Peter van Koppen.
John Lawrence joins us today from his previous job at EDS. John will be working on the Dialectical Argumentaiton Machines project, initially looking at developing the link between dialogue and monologue in implemented argumentation support systems.
John maintains his homepage at www.johnlawrence.net
Floris Bex joins us today having recently completed his PhD at the University of Groningen under the supervision of Henry Prakken, Bart Verheij and Peter van Koppen on the Making Sense of Evidence project. Floris will be working on the Dialectical Argumentation Machines project, initially exploring the links between structured and abstract argumentation and the link to visualization.
Floris maintains his homepage at www.florisbex.com
We are delighted to welcome Katarzyna Budzyńska to ARG for a year from today. Katarzyna is Assistant Professor of Logic at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, where she is coordinating the development of a Polish research community in argumentation. She also contributes to the PERSEUS project, which is focusing on developing links between computational models of argument and rhetorical and psychological models of persuasion. It is this work that she will be developing whilst resident at ARG:dundee.
Katarzyna maintains her homepage at http://argumentacja.pdg.pl/budzynska.
Mark, who was previously a programmer in ARG, today takes up a PhD studentship on the Dialectical Argumentation Machines project.
Mark maintains his homepage at www.marksnaith.co.uk
