Together with Marcello Guarini, Chris is this week delivering a graduate school on Reasoning & Argument: Computing & Cognitive Science Perspectives. The school is run in affiliation with the Centre for Research on Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, and runs immediately prior to the OSSA-2011 conference.
Chris is today taking part in an event to inaugurate the University of Houston Law School’s new program in Law and Computation. He joins folk representing legal AI (de Maat), Law (Ohm, Sichelman, Surden), Statistics (Izenman), Visualization (Katz), Business (Bommarito, Kotancheck) and the wider computer science world (Wolfram) to mark the start of Seth Chandler‘s exciting new initiative at UH.
Many congratulations to Joseph Devereux who, subject to minor corrections, today successfully defended his thesis entitled, Strategies for Persuasion in Inter-Agent Dialogue. He was examined by Francesca Toni (Imperial) and Ekaterina Komendantskaya (Dundee).
The Eleventh Annual Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument will be with AAAI in San Francisco this August. The Call for Papers is available on the CMNA website, www.cmna.info. The deadlines for submissions are 22 April (for long papers) and 1 May (for short papers). CMNA 2011 should be another productive and enjoyable event in the CMNA series.
An initial prototype of a new dialogue system is now available in the Arvina tool. Arvina implements the concept of Mixed Initiative Argumentation, whereby a mix of human players and agents enacting AIF resources can take part in a debate and have equal levels of participation: offering claims, asking questions, responding, challenging and so on.
You can see Arvina in action by watching the video below:
Arvina is a proof of concept demonstrator created as a part of the Dialectical Argumentation Machines project.
Jacky Visser
For the next two weeks or so, we are delighted to be hosting Jacky Visser, a visitor from the University of Amsterdam. Jacky is studying for a Masters by research, and whilst he is in Dundee, will be working on building connections between pragma-dialectics and computational argumentation, and looking at the AIF in particular.
A project to support analysis of argumentation in Polish has recently been completed.
In May 2010, the Polish version of Araucaria, called Araucaria-PL, was released. Araucaria-PL is the first and only tool for argument analysis and diagramming that has a Polish language interface and Polish schemesets. The entire package can be downloaded as the zip file Araucaria-PL.zip.
Araucaria-PL has been used to create first online corpus of analyzed Polish argumentation, ArgDB-pl. ArgDB-pl is developed as a Polish version of ArgDB. Both corpora are built on the open AIF standard for argument representation.
Araucaria-PL and ArgDB-pl are the result of a project coordinated by Katarzyna Budzyńska (from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw) and completed during her visit to ARG:dundee in 2009-10 supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education Program “Support for International Mobility of Scientists”. The project team also included Andrzej Nowacki and Joanna Skulska.
As a part of their Early Dispute Resolution initiative, the University of Dundee today hosted a meeting of Scottish mediators who visited ARG:Dundee to discuss the role of argumentation technology in mediation. To seed that discussion, we demonstrated many of the tools and projects that form a part of the group’s work, including the physical manipulation of argument resources via a Microsoft surface, as shown here.
Floris is this week giving a series of invited lectures at the Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science of the
China University of Political Science and Law. A total of three lectures are scheduled: The Science of Proof, Argumentation and Legal Evidence and Supporting Legal Argumentation.
Chris is today giving a keynote presentation at the 2nd International Conference on Logic, Argumentation and Critical Thinking, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Argumentation and Reasoning (CEAR) at
Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. A video of the keynote will be available.
