Katarzyna Budzynska

Circularity in ethotic structures

The aim of this paper is to provide a model that allows the representation and analysis of circularity in ethotic structures, i.e. in communication structures related to the speaker’s character and in particular, his credibility. The paper studies three types of cycles: in self-referential sentences, embedded testimony and ethotic begging the question. It is shown that standard models allow the reconstruction of the circularities only if those circular utterances are interpreted as ethotic arguments. Their alternative, assertive interpretation requires enriching the existing models with a purely ethotic component related to the credibility of the performer of any (not necessarily argumentative) speech act.

Proving Propositional Tautologies in a Natural Dialogue

The paper proposes a dialogue system LND which brings together and unifies two traditions in studying dialogue as a game: the dialogical logic introduced by Lorenzen; and persuasion dialogue games as specified by Prakken. The first approach allows the representation of formal dialogues in which the validity of argument is the topic discussed. The second tradition has focused on natural dialogues examining, e.g., informal fallacies typical in real-life communication. Our goal is to unite these two approaches in order to allow communicating agents to benefit from the advantages of both, i.e., to equip them with the ability not only to persuade each other about facts, but also to prove that a formula used in an argument is a classical propositional tautology. To this end, we propose a new description of the dialogical logic which meets the requirements of Prakkens generic specification for natural dialogues, and we introduce rules allowing to embed a formal dialogue in a natural one. We also show the correspondence result between the original and the new version of the dialogical logic, i.e., we show that a winning strategy for a proponent in the original version of the dialogical logic means a winning strategy for a proponent in the new version, and conversely.

Perseus. Software for Analyzing Persuasion Process

The aim of the paper is to present the software tool Perseus and show how it can be used to examine multi-agent systems where the ability to persuade is specified. Especially we want to study the issues such as: what arguments individuals use to successfully convince others, what type of a persuader guarantees a victory etc. This work describes implementation of the tool and discusses what questions about persuasion process Perseus can answer and how it is done.

Strategies in Dialogues: A Game-Theoretic Approach

The aim of the paper is to propose a game-theoretic description of strate- gies available to players in dialogues. We show how existing dialogical systems can be formalized as Nash-style games, and how the game-theoretic concept of so- lutions (dominant strategies, Nash equilibrium) can be used to analyse these sys- tems. Our first study, discussed in this article, describes the game DC introduced by Mackenzie.

Araucaria-PL: software for teaching argumentation theory

The paper aims to present the software system Araucaria-PL which is the only Polish tool designed to teach argumentation theory. It is developed on the basis of Araucaria by Reed and Rowe and extended with a module capturing persuasive aspects of argumentation. The tool has been used to create a Polish online corpus of analyzed argumentation ArgDB-pl. Moreover, the paper presents the preliminary study of usefulness of Araucaria-PL for teaching about argument structures and schemes at the standard Polish courses of logic and rhetoric

The Argument Web: an Online Ecosystem of Tools, Systems and Services for Argumentation

The Argument Web is maturing as both a platform built upon a synthesis of many contemporary theories of argumentation in philosophy and also as an ecosystem in which various applications and application components are contributed by different research groups around the world. It already hosts the largest publicly accessible corpora of argumentation and has the largest number of interoperable and cross compatible tools for the analysis, navigation and evaluation of arguments across a broad range of domains, languages and activity types. Such interoperability is key in allowing innovative combinations of tool and data reuse that can further catalyse the development of the field of computational argumentation. The aim of this paper is to summarise the key foundations, the recent advances and the goals of the Argument Web, with a particular focus on demonstrating the relevance to, and roots in, philosophical argumentation theory.

The CASS Technique for Evaluating the Performance of Argument Mining.

Argument mining integrates many distinct computational linguistics tasks, and as a result, reporting agreement between annotators or between automated output and gold standard is particularly challenging. More worrying for the field, agreement and performance are also reported in a wide variety of different ways, making comparison between approaches difficult. To solve this problem, we propose the CASS technique for combining metrics covering different parts of the argument mining task. CASS delivers a justified method of integrating results yielding confusion matrices from which CASS-κ and CASS-F1 scores can be calculated.

Reasoning about dialogical strategies

The paper proposes an extension of the modal logic

Update of Probabilistic Beliefs: Implementation and Parametric Verification

{\cal AG}_n

Using Argumentative Structure to Interpret Debates in Online Deliberative Democracy and eRulemaking

with operators for reasoning about different types of strategies which agents may adopt in order to win a dialogue game. We model agent communication using the paradigm of formal systems of dialogues and in particular, a system proposed by Prakken. In the paper, the traditional notion of a winning strategy is extended with a notion of a strategy giving a chance for success and a notion of a strategy giving a particular degree of chances for victory. Then, using the framework of Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL) we specify