Presentation @ the Inaugural Scottish Argumentation Day

Yesterday I gave a presentation about my research at the inaugural Scottish Argumentation Day which was held at Aberdeen University, hosted by the Department of Computer Science and kindly organised by Nir Oren. I wanted to present a high-level overview of my interests and talked about my research (including MAgtALO, ArguBlogging & FireBack, Parley, Warblr and the Arguing Agents Competition) and my day job working with the governance and intelligent use of of BIG healthcare datasets. I also included a few slides talking about the Dialogue Game Description Language (DGDL) as some of the work that ARG:dundee presented earlier builds upon DGDL as a fundamental technology.

aberdeen.pdf Download this file

New Job: Software Developer @ the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression

I have a new job. I recently joined the award winning (2011 BBSRC "Innovators of the year") OMERO project. My role is to develop extensions to the existing server product in order to support data-intensive research and secure data management for healthcare informatics in alignment with NHS governance guidelines for the use of clinical data. This is a joint project between the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression (GRE) and the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the University of Dundee.

Paper: Using an argument ontology to develop pedagogical tool suites

• Abstract: "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."
• Paper Link: This will be available after the workshop
• Presentation Link: ditto
• Citation: C. Reed, S. Wells, M. Snaith, K. Budzynska & J. Lawrence, "Using an argument ontology to develop pedagogical tool suites", (2011), in Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Tools for Teaching Logic (TICTTL 2011). Salamanca, Spain.

Presentation @ Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression, Dundee University

On Monday 14th January, I gave a short invited talk to members of the Open Microscopy Environment project based in the Swedlow Lab located in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression at the University of Dundee. There were a number of focii to this talk:

• overall research interests, starting broadly with AI, then focussing rapidly to argumentative dialogue systems,
• the broad classes of problems that I am interested in,
• a (very) brief, software focussed overview of projects I have been involved in sketching the thread of research from my early work on multi-agent dialogue systems through formalisation of dialogue protocols in my early post-doc research, and finishing with my most recent applied work in online argumentation, pedagogical dialogue, and web-scale argumentation technologies.

Presentation Slides:

Download now or preview on posterous

dundee2011.pdf (5836 KB)

Fundamentals Concepts in Computer Science: Computability

There is a nice brief introduction to computability over at Good Math, Bad Math. My research has increasingly moved in the direction of this area of formal computer science over the last couple of years as I have developed the Dialogue Game Description Language, a domain specific language underpinned by a formal grammar expressed in EBNF and used to describe inter-agent communication protocols.

From my perspective, if you are interested in finding out more about what Dijkstra meant when he stated that "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" then this article is a good place to start. Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation as well as the more practically oriented implementation and application aspects. It is these theoretical foundations that computability is concerned with. More specifically computability is a sub-branch of the theory of computation an area of computer science that addresses questions like "what problems can we solve using a computing device?" and "if we can solve this problem on a computer, how efficiently can we do so?".

Introducing Filibustery

Whilst not directly argumentation in the sense that I am usually interested in, the Filibuster is a political debate technique that has a long history going back at least as far as the Roman empire. The Filibuster is a type of gamesmanship that (mis-)uses the rules of debate found in the parliamentary procedures of a range of countries to enable a proposal to be delayed or obstructed. This happens because the procedures allocate a given amount of time for discussion and voting. If the time runs out before voting is complete then the proposal is effectively blocked.

Over at Filibustery, the Filibuster is getting some attention with a series of videos exploring filibustery. The first episode has been posted and we are promised that the second will be posted in the lab fairly soon.

Analysing the Tactics Used in Debates

There are a series of interesting posts over at Jean Goodwin's blog that looks at the process of debate and the tactics used therein, using the debate between Marc Morano and Mark Maslin as an exemplar.

The tactics discussed are:

1. Civility - How do the speakers interact? Do they interact directly with each other or via the interviewer (in this case). Do the speakers maintain the appearance of civility all the way through? How do they address each other? Does this change during the debate? How do the speakers characterise each other? Are the speakers having fun? Are they irritated? Are the speakers engaging each other or are they dismissive?
2. Hedging & Asserting - Hedging is using words or phrases to limit the amount of imposition on the other party. Whilst debate is, by its nature, about disgreement, hedging backs away from open disagreement by using phrases like "I think" or "I believe" out of a desire to avoid a confrontation. Asserting sets up a confrontational position and hedging generally weakens such a position.
3. What's the issue? - What are the speaker's arguing about? Why are they arguing about this issue? Have they been influenced or coerced into the debate? Has the motivating issue changed from the original issue? Did one of the speaker's manage to shift the issue from the originating issue to something else that is easier to win?
4. Bringing the arguments home - Assess the arguments made during the debate. Have the speakers managed to persuasively link their supporting data to their conclusions? Are all the steps in the argument explicit or are there gaps? Are these gaps because there is no evidence? or are they rhetorical? or both?    
5. The adverse witness - Do both speakers quote the same data or sources? Are these used to draw different conclusions? Do the speakers try to use their opponents quoted data or sources against them?
6. The appeal to authority, by the numbers - Sometimes we have to trust what the experts say? Are we being asked to look at the evidence and draw our own conclusions or are we being asked to trust the experts who have already done this for us. Goodwin makes an interesting point about the role of appeals to authority in the modern world:
   

   Appropriate appeals to authority were taken off the list of fallacies long ago. For good reason: we couldn’t survive without others’ expertise. We’re everywhere dependent on knowledges divided up into disciplines far more minutely than the work in Adam Smith’s old pin factory. In some cases our very lives may hang on the specialized knowledge that went into the design of a car’s floor mat or a factory’s system for washing spinach–although we’re only likely to remember it when the design goes bad.

7. Scientific Consensus - How do consensus claims work? Goodwin refers to one of her own projects which investigates this question. An interesting aspect is depicted called "rising above" which can turn the audience if they perceive that you are being condescending or arrogant. This is of course a risk if you are presenting yourself as the expert or amongst the experts as it could lead your opponent, or the audience, to perceive that you believe them to somehow be beneath you or not sufficiently educated to understand for themselves.

8. Repeating oneself all over again (Argument Craftsmanship) - Is the speaker taking a general idea, that has been expressed many times before, and adapting it to the current situation? Has the idea been formulated and refined in such a way as to provide a logically strong position, but no stronger? In this case, Goodwin suggests the use of topoi in the form of small but forceful chunks of domain knowledge that you can organise and assert as required to support your position or attack your opponents position.    

9. Take advantage of your opponents' commitments - Do the speakers each build their case based on the commitments incurred by their opponent? This approach was introduced in the adverse witness post where it was noted that in order to debate where there are numerous constrictions, e.g. issue complexity, limited audience knowledge, limited debate time, using shared concessions is a good way to make progress. Essentially, one of the most basic and powerful tactics for winning a debate is being able to take the things that your opponent has said and turn them around, use them against your opponent.

All in all a good analysis of the debate from a rhetorical perspective. Analysing those aspects of the debate that can be separated from the specific things that were said and the specific effect that they had on speakers and audience, and can be more generally identified as tactics for winning the debate.