Carlos Chesñevar from the Universities of Lleida (Spain) and Nacional del Sur (Argentina) is visiting us today and tomorrow. He is presenting a seminar Wednesday (Feb 14th) afternoon at 3pm in Wolfson:

Recommender System Technologies based on Argumentation

Recommender systems have evolved in the last years as specialized
tools to assist users in a plethora of computer-mediated tasks by
providing guidelines or hints. Most recommender systems are aimed
at facilitating access to relevant items, a situation particularly
common when performing web-based tasks.

At the same time, argumentation has been gaining increasing
importance in several AI-related areas, mainly as a vehicle for
facilitating rationally justifiable decision making when handling
incomplete and potentially inconsistent information. In this
setting, argument-based approaches can be used to automatize
reasoning and decision making in several situations such as
the handling of complex policies or managing change in dynamic
environments.

In this talk we will present a first approach towards combining
recommender system technologies with argument-based inference.
The ultimate goal is to enhance practical reasoning capabilities
of current recommender system technology by incorporating
argument-based qualitative inference.
Proof of concept prototypes of the proposed approach have been
developed using using Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP),
an argument-based logic programming framework.

Some particular case studies will be discussed. One of them will
involve applying argumentation in the classification of web search
results according to preference criteria declaratively specified
by the user. We will also present an overview of an argument-based
critiquing system for language usage assessment, where
suggestions are built on the basis of the Web linguistic corpus.

The presentation will conclude by discussing some of the
relevant research lines that are currently being pursued
for developing argument-based decision making.

Main references:

– “Recommender System Technologies based on Argumentation”
(C. Chesñevar, A. Maguitman, G. Simari).
In “Emerging Artificial Intelligence Applications in Computer Engineering”.
(Series Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications).
Ilias Maglogiannis, Kostas Karpouzis and John Soldatos (eds). IOS Press,
2007 (in preparation).

– “Argument-Based Critics and Recommenders: A Qualitative Perspective on User
Support Systems”
(C. Chesñevar, A. Maguitman, G. Simari).
Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE), Elsevier, Vol.59, Issue 2, pp. 293-319,
2006.

– “An Argument-based Decision Support System for Assessing Natural Language
Usage on the Basis of the Web Corpus”
(C. Chesñevar, M. Sabaté, A. Maguitman).
Intl. Journal of Intelligent Systems (IJIS), Wiley, Vol. 21, Issue 11,
pp.1151-1180, 2006.

– “Solving Power and Trust Conflicts through Argumentation in Agent-mediated
Knowledge Distribution”
(C. Chesñevar, R. Brena, J. Aguirre).
Intl. Journal of Knowledge-based and Intelligent Engineering Systems,
special issue on agent-based Knowledge Management.
Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 263-276, 2006. IOS Press.