Chris is attending a workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl this week to contribute to a sketching out of where argumentation research is heading over the next few years. It promises to be an interesting meeting, which aims to produce a series of papers by the end of the year.
Iyad Rahwan from the British University in Dubai is visiting us today to talk about ABN and other things. We have been working with Iyad for some time on the Argument Interchange Format, ArgDF and various other things.
He will be speaking On the Benefits of Exploiting Underlying Goals in
Argument-based Negotiation at 1500 in the Lecture Theatre (not Wolfson today).
ABSTRACT: Interest-based negotiation (IBN) is a form of negotiation in
which agents exchange information about their underlying goals, with a
view to improving the likelihood and quality of a deal. While this
intuition has been stated informally in much previous literature,
there is no formal analysis of the types of deals that can be reached
through IBN and how they differ from those reachable using (classical)
alternating offer bargaining. This talk bridges this gap by providing
a formal framework for analysing the outcomes of IBN dialogues, and
begins by analysing a specific IBN protocol.
Doug Walton and Chris Reed are talking today at OSSA about the link between argumentation schemes and dialogue. For although schemes are inherently dialogical (think about the role that critical questions play, for example), they have not previously been treated in such a way as to integrate them into models of dialogue. The paper provides a first step in this direction. A commentary on the paper is given by Taeda Tomic from Uppsala University.
In collaboration with a team at Leuven university, the Araucaria corpus is starting to be used to explore the problems of automatic argument analysis, in the context of their ACILA project. A short paper describing some initial results has just been accepted to ICAIL-2007 in Stanford.
The current bibliographic data is:
Moens, M.-F., Boiy, E., Palau, R.M., & Reed, C. (2007, to appear) “Automatic Detection of Arguments in Legal Texts” in Proceedings of the International Conference on AI & Law (ICAIL-2007), Stanford, CA, ACM Press.
Some of the work related to the ArgDF project with Iyad Rahwan has also been accepted for AAAI-07 in Vancouver. This paper is a complement to the one accepted to Artificial Intelligence a couple of weeks ago.
The current bibliographic data is:
Rahwan, I., Zablith, F. & Reed, C. (2007, to appear) “Towards Large Scale Argumentation Support on the Semantic Web” in Proceedings of AAAI-07, Vancouver, AAAI Press / MIT Press.
Rieks op den Akker from Twente is visiting ARG today to talk about his experiences with the AMI and AMI(DA) projects:
Modeling conversations in meetings
In the talk I will present the EC projects AMI(DA) that aim at developing meeting support technology for face to face as well as remote meetings. I will concentrate on presenting the AMI meeting corpus, an exetensively annotated corpus of meeting conversations and discuss several reseach on the interactions we see in these meetings showing joint verbal as well as non-verbal behaviors for grounding. I also present an argumentation diagramming method developed at the University of Twente.
I’m delighted to say that a paper describing our work with Iyad Rahwan on ArgDF has been accepted to the special issue of Artificial Intelligence on Argumentation edited by Paul Dunne and Trevor Bench-Capon.
The current bibliographic data is:
Rahwan, I., Zablith, F. & Reed, C. (2007, to appear) “Laying the Foundations for a World Wide Argument Web”, Artificial Intelligence.
Analyses of argumentation schemes developed in the group here have been adapted for use in Compendium, a popular discussion mapping tool. This is a nice example of the sort of re-use that XML (and Araucaria‘s AML) allows, and that the AIF is designed to simplify. There are more details at the Compendium site.
Chris has been invited to sit on the Programme Committee of the 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web which aims to combine existing semantic web technology with collaborative working, social networking, debate and (of course) argumentation. Deadline for submissions is 07 May 2007.
Chris is giving a non-technical talk on the work of ARG:dundee to the local chapter of the BCS this evening in Wolfson at 1900.
Arguing for Computers
or, the Computational Advantages of being Disagreeable.
Web Services, Service Oriented Architectures and methods on objects: the
paradigm for enterprise software in the first decade of the 21st century
is one of cooperation and guaranteed levels of service. Recent research
in computer science is starting to demonstrate that a paradigm shift may
be waiting in the wings. If we build software components that decide
whether or not to supply a service (rather than guaranteeing it), our
complex systems become more reliable. If we design software components
that work competitively, rather than cooperatively, they can find better
solutions to hard problems. And if we plan systems that disagree,
dispute and argue, we can increase efficiency in communication and
processing.
This talk explores what selfishness, autonomy and argument mean for
current computational research and future computational practice,
placing a heavy emphasis on systems, tools and techniques that are
available now.
Dr Chris Reed is Senior Lecturer and Head of Research at the University
of Dundee’s School of Computing, where he leads a group exploring the
roles of argument in computing and artificial intelligence. He has
worked in the area since the mid 1990’s and has published over 80 papers
on the topic. He is also an executive director of Calico Jack Ltd., a
Dundee-based SME that builds network solutions for mobile operators
based on non-traditional software engineering techniques aimed at
handling complex, distributed application domains.
