“like” button on Facebook and “share”
button on Twitter.” This way, the ArguBlogging tool uses familiar interaction styles to enable critical argumentation on the Web.
evaluating the Argument Web
The kind of continuous evaluation
needed by the Argument Web involves
usability in two distinct domains—
public and academic—and expressivity
and computational flexibility through
metrics drawing on formal, computational methods, as well as on more
pragmatic engineering principles.
In terms of raw usage through compatible tools (such as Rationale and
Araucaria), the Argument Web today
includes tens of thousands of users
worldwide. The native applications
(such as OVA) released in the past few
years naturally involve fewer, but the
core AIFdb includes more than 11,000
argument components, the second
largest semantically rich argumentation dataset (after Debategraph),
including in seven languages; for
example, the Archelogos repository
is fully imported into the Argument
Web. More significant, the infrastructure and analysis tools have been used
in at least seven research projects involving 10 labs in France, Poland, the
U.K., and the U.S., each with different
foci, including generative and analytical, multilingual and monolingual,
and dialogical and monological.
In terms of expressivity, the Argument Web balances well-defined
formal properties and pragmatic solutions to engineering problems; for
example, the underlying ontology is
demonstrably more expressive than
one of the foremost formal accounts
of defeasible argumentation, ASPIC+,
2
but a well-defined subset can be used
to induce abstract frameworks on
which evaluation can be performed.
16
Ongoing work in discourse analysis5
demonstrates that even rhetorically
and linguistically sophisticated maneuvers (such as ad hominem argumentation) can be captured in the
Argument Web. At the same time,
formal description-logic analysis of
the AIF ontology13 shows powerful
abstractions can support advanced
search and evaluation of arguments
involving, say, specific schemes of presumptive reasoning.
to tease apart the structure of what is
being said, directly inserting it into the
Argument Web.
Direct discussion and mixed-ini-tiative argumentation. Direct discussion between two or more people on
the Web takes place not just via email
and instant messaging but also on forums and message boards. However,
these technologies offer only the
most basic of structural tools, and the
inferential structure of an argument
in a discussion is easily lost. The Web-based discussion software Arvina10
(see Figure 4) allows participants to
debate a range of topics in real time
in a way that is structured but at the
same time is unobtrusive. Users
can ask questions (such as “Do you
agree?” and “Why do you think this
is the case?”) of other participants
in the discussion, as well as express
their own agreement or disagreement
with a particular point and provide
supporting reasons for their views.
Moreover, Arvina can use dialogue
protocols to structure the discussion
between participants.
Arvina can take on a multi-agent
system populated by agents repre-
senting authors whose opinions are
available on the Argument Web. It is
thus possible to question the partici-
pants of, say, past Moral Maze radio
programs about their opinions, and
agents representing participants can
be added to a discussion and ques-
tioned about what they think about
the topic discussed during the pro-
gram. An agent then answers by giv-
ing the opinions originally expressed
during the broadcast by a particular
participant. In this way people are able
to question any opinion expressed on
the Argument Web, whether originally
added through OVA, ArguBlogging, or
other tools.
Argument blogging. A final example
of how argumentation technologies
based on the Argument Web facilitates
online debate concerns blogging, a
highly popular form of online communication. If one wants to reply to an
opinion presented somewhere on the
Web in a blog, the usual way is to provide a simple hyperlink to the article or
page in which the opinion is expressed.
However, the resulting structure of
supporting and competing opinions
is easily lost due to lack of semantic information in the links.
We built a simple tool called ArguBlogging, for Argument Blogging,
10
to improve rational debate through
this popular form of expressing opinions online. It ensures that, if desired,
opinions on blogs and other webpages
can be linked through the underlying
infrastructure of the Argument Web,
allowing users to agree or disagree
with opinions anywhere on the Web,
simultaneously posting it to their blog
(connecting to two popular blogging
platforms, Blogger and Tumblr) and
adding it to the Argument Web; Figure
5 is the ArguBlogging window (or widget) rendered on a webpage, providing
options for responding.
A typical blog post through ArguBlogging contains an “argue” button that, clicked, brings the widget
onscreen. It allows users to respond
to the blog post as a whole through
ArguBlogging and is similar to the
figure 5. the ArguBlogging widget.