Mark Snaith

Implementing the argument web

Improve online public discourse by connecting opinions across blogs, editorials, and social media.

ArguBlogging: An application for the Argument Web

In this paper, we present a software tool for ‘ArguBlogging’, which allows users to construct debate and discussions across blogs, linking existing and new online resources to form distributed, structured conversations. Arguments and counterarguments can be posed by giving opinions on one’s own blog and replying to other bloggers’ posts. The resulting argument structure is connected to the Argument Web, in which argumentative structures are made semantically explicit and machine-processable. We discuss the ArguBlogging tool and the underlying infrastructure and ontology of the Argument Web.

Using an argument ontology to develop pedagogical tool suites

The teaching of argumentation theory, argumentation skills and critical thinking has only very recently enjoyed any bespoke software support for classroom activities. As software has started to become available, it has been characterised by idiosyncratic, incompatible approaches not only to data representation and processing but also to underlying theories of argument. The rise in popularity of the Argument Interchange Format ontology offers a principled solution to this problem, and we describe here three tools (OVA, Arvina and Parley) which use the AIF to provide pedagogical applications, and a sketch is given of how these tools can complement one another and can share resources.

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.

Debating Technology for Dialogical Argument: Sensemaking, Engagement, and Analytics

Debating technologies, a newly emerging strand of research into computational technologies to support human debating, offer a powerful way of providing naturalistic, dialogue-based interaction with complex information spaces. The full potential of debating technologies for dialogical argument can, however, only be realized once key technical and engineering challenges are overcome, namely data structure, data availability, and interoperability between components. Our aim in this article is to show that the Argument Web, a vision for integrated, reusable, semantically rich resources connecting views, opinions, arguments, and debates online, offers a solution to these challenges. Through the use of a running example taken from the domain of citizen dialogue, we demonstrate for the first time that different Argument Web components focusing on sensemaking, engagement, and analytics can work in concert as a suite of debating technologies for rich, complex, dialogical argument.