John Lawrence joins us today from his previous job at EDS. John will be working on the Dialectical Argumentaiton Machines project, initially looking at developing the link between dialogue and monologue in implemented argumentation support systems.
John maintains his homepage at www.johnlawrence.net
Floris Bex joins us today having recently completed his PhD at the University of Groningen under the supervision of Henry Prakken, Bart Verheij and Peter van Koppen on the Making Sense of Evidence project. Floris will be working on the Dialectical Argumentation Machines project, initially exploring the links between structured and abstract argumentation and the link to visualization.
Floris maintains his homepage at www.florisbex.com
We are delighted to welcome Katarzyna Budzyńska to ARG for a year from today. Katarzyna is Assistant Professor of Logic at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, where she is coordinating the development of a Polish research community in argumentation. She also contributes to the PERSEUS project, which is focusing on developing links between computational models of argument and rhetorical and psychological models of persuasion. It is this work that she will be developing whilst resident at ARG:dundee.
Katarzyna maintains her homepage at http://argumentacja.pdg.pl/budzynska.
Mark, who was previously a programmer in ARG, today takes up a PhD studentship on the Dialectical Argumentation Machines project.
Mark maintains his homepage at www.marksnaith.co.uk
The EPSRC funded, three-year, £570k project Dialectical Argumentation Machines officially starts today. Although an official launch will not happen until early in the New Year, we are off to a flying start with three new appointments. The project will be investigating the links between dialogue and monologue and between linguistically-oriented structured arguments and mathematically-oriented abstract arguments.
The group has been working on some tools that help with the analysis of argument, but that have a very low barrier to use. The first result is OVA (Online Visualisation of Argument) which is an online Flash tool for analysing arguments in web pages. In some ways it is similar to Araucaria, though it is not as sophisticated. It can also generate AIF analyses, and can save them to ArgDB. Both AIF and ArgDB form cornerstones of the the EPSRC-funded project Dialectical Argumentation Machines which aims to build the infrastructure required for the World Wide Argument Web.
OVA’s home page is here, and an alpha version of OVA is available for general use at http://ova.computing.dundee.ac.uk. We are keen to hear your feedback: please do contact Chris, Simon or Mark.
Simon gave a presentation on the Argument Blogging project to CMNA 9 held at IJCAI in Pasadena recently. As described in a previous post argument blogging is the process of harvesting textual resources from the WWW and structuring them in terms of argumentative dialogues. The aim is to support distributed dialogues occuring online and to capture those interactions in a form that can be reused.
Our SICSA Distinguished Visitor, Henry Prakken, is delivering a masterclass today aimed at PhD students on the topic of Logics for Argumentation. We will be meeting from 1pm to 4pm in the seminar room in the School of Computing.
In recent years, argumentation has become an increasingly popular topic in
the symbolic study of commonsense reasoning and inter-agent communication.
In logical models of commonsense reasoning, the argumentation metaphor has
proved to overcome some drawbacks of other formalisms. Many of these have
a mathematical nature that is remote from how people actually perceive
their everyday commonsense reasoning, which makes it difficult to
understand and trust the behavior of an intelligent system. The
argumentation approach bridges this gap by providing logical formalisms
that are rigid enough to be formally studied and implemented, while at the
same time being close enough to informal reasoning to be understood by
designers and users. In the current course the fundamental concepts and
structure of argumentation logics will be discussed.
Our SICSA visitor, Prof. Henry Prakken, is delivery a seminar today entitled, “Sense-making software for fact finding in law“. We will be in Wolfson at noon as usual. Henry will also be leading our weekly reading group session this afternoon.
Adam Wyner, from London, who is working with folks at UCL and Liverpool, amongst others, and who has PhDs both in linguistics from Cornell and also in computer science from Kings, is visiting us today. He will be speaking on “From Arguments in Natural Language to Argumentation Frameworks” at 1200 in the seminar room.
