Araucaria software argument

Then these dialogues are diagrammed with the argument visualization software Araucaria, and a simple formal protocol is proposed of persuasion dialogues with embedded burden-of-proof dialogues. Examination dialogue: An argumentation framework for critically questioning an expert opinion by Douglas Walton - Journal of Pragmatics , This paper provides an analysis of a special type called examination dialogue, in which one party questions another party, sometimes critically or even antagonistically, to try to find out what that party knows about something.

This type of dialogu Abstract - Cited by 9 1 self - Add to MetaCart uses types of dialogue as contexts of argument use.

This type of dialogue is most prominent in law and in both legal and non-legal arguments based on expert opinion. It is also central to dialogue systems for questioning and answering in expert systems in artificial intelligence. Examples studied are: 1 exegetical analyses and criticisms of religious and philosophical texts, and 2 legal examinations and cross-examinations conducted in a trial setting.

When detectives perform investigations they manage a huge amount of information, they make use of specialized skills and analyze a wide knowledge base of evidence. Most of the work is not explicitly recorded and this hurdles external reviews and training. In this paper we propose a model able to org Abstract - Cited by 6 0 self - Add to MetaCart When detectives perform investigations they manage a huge amount of information, they make use of specialized skills and analyze a wide knowledge base of evidence.

In this paper we propose a model able to organize forensic knowledge in a reusable way. Thus, past experience may be used to train new personnel, to foster knowledge sharing among detective communities and to expose collected information to quality assessment by third parties.

Argumentation schemes and enthymemes by D. Walton, C. Reed - Synthese. The aim of this investigation is to explore the role of argumentation schemes in enthymeme reconstruction. This aim is pursued by studying selected cases of incomplete arguments in natural language discourse to see what the requirements are for filling in the unstated premises and conclusi This aim is pursued by studying selected cases of incomplete arguments in natural language discourse to see what the requirements are for filling in the unstated premises and conclusions in some systematic and useful way.

Some of these cases are best handled using deductive tools, while others respond best to an analysis based on defeasible argumentations schemes.

The approach is also shown to work reasonably well for weak arguments, a class of arguments that has always been difficult to analyze without the principle of charity producing a straw man. Abstract: This paper explains how to use a new software tool for argument diagramming available free on the Internet, showing especially how it can be used in the classroom to enhance critical thinking in philosophy.

The user loads a text file containing an argument into a box on the computer interf Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Chris Reed. Glenn Rowe. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. By identifying the structure of an argument in terms of its constituents and the relationships between them, it becomes easier to critically evaluate each part of an argument in turn.

The task of analysis and diagramming, however, is labor intensive and often idiosyncratic, which can make academic exchange difficult. The Araucaria system provides an interface which supports the diagramming process, and then saves the result using AML, an open standard, designed in XML, for describing argument structure.

Araucaria aims to be of use not only in pedagogical situations, but also in support of research activity. As a result, it has been designed from the outset to handle more advanced argumentation theoretic concepts such as schemes, which capture stereotypical patterns of reasoning. The software is also designed to be compatible with a number of applications under development, including dialogic interaction and online corpus provision. Together, these features, combined with its platform independence and ease of use, have the potential to make Araucaria a valuable resource for the academic community.

Keywords: Argumentation schemes, argumentation theory, critical thinking, diagramming, informal logic, XML 1. Introduction and Motivation Argumentation theory aims to analyse, describe, and evaluate arguments that occur in the real world. It is listed as a topic in many undergraduate syllabi, where it aims to teach students both to think critically about the arguments of others, and to create better, more measured arguments of their own.

One of the key tools available to the discipline is diagramming. The claims and their associated reasons within a given argument are identified, and the relationships between them drawn up as trees. This diagram then serves as a basis for criticism and reflection. Increasingly, theories of argumentation are being used throughout artificial intelligence, in areas such as multi-agent communication, natural language generation, user modelling and decision support1. Computer software might well be anticipated to be highly suited to the task of visualising the sort of diagrams used in argumentation theory.

And yet, there are very few computer systems which support argument diagramming for the student, and none at all which support the diversity and sophistication of analyses formed within the research community. It is this dearth of computer support for a labor intensive but crucial activity, which is addressed in this paper.

Background The development of informal logic and argumentation theory within philosophy has represented a backlash against post-Fregean formal logic, which though immensely powerful and widely applicable, is a poor choice for representing and characterising natural — i. The inception of informal logic marked by Toulmin2, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca3, and others saw a return to an empirically driven logic. Within argumentation theory, systems of diagramming argument have played an important practical role, in two distinct areas.

The first is in pedagogy: employing diagrams in support of the teaching of critical thinking skills. Though opinion is divided as to the degree to which diagramming is useful for all students see, for example, Ref. These results concur with more general results in the psychology of reasoning see Ref 6: for an introductory discussion of this issue. The driving force provided by the need to teach critical thinking, and the rise in utility and subsequent popularity of computer assisted learning packages, has led to the appearance of a number of software systems for argument diagramming which are intended for pedagogical use.

One of the most sophisticated and polished examples is the Reason! Able system5. This system aids students — particularly those learning informal reasoning skills at an introductory level in schools and universities and, they report, even kindergarten — in constructing and analysing argument maps. These maps employ arrows and colours to indicate support and rebuttal relationships and are manipulated through a straightforward interface that is appealing to children.

The preliminary results reported in Ref. For van Gelder, as with the work described below, the focus is on the software itself; there are other examples where the focus is on other resources typically a textbook and the software plays more of a supporting role. Some of these exercises involve basic diagramming, but as the software is encompassing the range of techniques introduced in the text, the diagramming components themselves are rather limited and constraining, and unlike Reason! Able, are restricted to only those examples provided in the software.

The second role of diagramming is in the construction and implementation of theories of argument evaluation within the research community. One of the earliest methods, now the textbook favourite, is that proposed by Beardsley8, and enhanced with nomenclature by Thomas9. More recently, inadequacies and problems with this standard treatment have been identified, leading several authors to propose alternatives, e. The various approaches to the issue of diagramming, of which these are just a few, represent scholarly approaches to problems that lie at the heart of argumentation theory and informal logic.

Although there has not to date been software specifically designed to support research into argumentation and diagramming, there have been a few systems which impact upon that research. Foremost amongst these is the ambitious and far-reaching Archelogos project under development at the University of Edinburgh12, which aims to analyse and mark-up substantial portions of the argumentation in the oeuvres of both Plato and Aristotle, and provide an interface that allows online navigation of the structure of the reasoning in the works.

The Archelogos project does not, however, focus upon diagramming the structure that is produced through analysis. In contrast, work in linguistics, and in particular in pragmatics, aiming to analyse interclausal relations, uses software tools to build diagrammatic analyses of textual structure.

RSTtool13 is a good example of such software, and it has been argued14 that the approach can be applied to argumentative text just as it can to any other genre. These linguistic research projects make no use, however, of the rich analytical structures and techniques of argumentation theory. Finally, argumentation itself has found many applications within computer science, and various branches of artificial intelligence in particular.

A review of many of these systems can be found in Ref. An analysis of interdisciplinary work between argumentation and each of multi-agent systems, legal reasoning, decision support, computational linguistics, and contextual reasoning, can be found in Ref. The focus here, however, is squarely upon software to support both teaching and research in argumentation theory.

Araucaria The Araucaria system does not attempt to tackle fundamental restrictions of the diagramming process. As with other methods of analysing textual structure — such as Rhetorical Structure Theory, RST14, for example — any given analysis is potentially disputable. RST offers a means of specifying the relation that holds between spans of text — though both the judgements concerning the delimitation of text structure phrases, and the identification of relationships between those phrases, can be challenged.

Mann and Thompson suggest that in marking up the rhetorical structure of a text, the analyst makes plausibility judgements rather than absolute analytical decisions and that there can be more than one reasonable analysis. The assumptions behind Araucaria follow the same pattern: a single text might be analysed in several different ways, depending upon a variety of analytical choices.

As in RST, the judgements concerning the delimitation of argument components can vary, depending upon the aims of the analyst and the clarity of the text itself.

Example Ex1 is an excerpt from an extended argument taken from a US Supreme Court case, and used in a current textbook Ref. Because Nancy Beth Cruzan did not have the foresight to preserve her constitutional right in a living will, or some comparable "clear and convincing" alternative, her right is gone forever and her fate is in the hands of the state Legislature instead of in those of her family, her independent neutral guardian ad litem, and an impartial judge — all of whom agree on the course of action that is in her best interests.

One defensible analysis would include four components in the first sentence, and three in the second. Johnson's analysis, in contrast, considers each of the two sentences to be indivisible units. In the context of the analysis, the reasons for his choice are clear, namely, to ensure that the analysis is at an appropriate level of abstraction the text of the example runs over several pages , and to provide a pedagogically sound tutorial.

Also analogously to RST, decisions about the relationships between components may also vary. Freeman10 points out, for example, that a given text might be analysed using the Toulmin2 schema, and the data and warrant be quite interchangeable. Furthermore, recent work examining argumentation schemes — stereotypical patterns of nondeductive reasoning — has demonstrated that a single text might be regarded as instantiating several different schemes, depending on the focus of the analysis Again by analogy to RST, there is also freedom in analytic resources.

Mann and Thompson emphasise that the set of relations they put forward is simply one possible set that has been found to have utility in the analysis of a particular corpus. They claim neither exhaustiveness nor accuracy of their proposed set, instead describing the process by which researchers can produce their own sets of relations. A similar solution is adopted in the provision of schemesets of argumentation schemes.

Many scholars and teachers of critical thinking and related fields find that argumentation schemes are a useful tool for describing the relationships between argument components.

Determining a single, exhaustive, consistent set of schemes has proved difficult — though existing sets such as Refs. The importance of argumentation schemes is also growing within various computational applications of argument21, so one aim in developing the Araucaria software was to ensure that argumentation schemes were coherently integrated.

The choice of which - if any - argument set to use is left to the user, with the standard distribution including not only schemeset definitions corresponding to the Grennan, Kienpointner and Walton lists mentioned, but also software to design custom schemesets in a straightforward manner. Finally, one analytic freedom with which RST does not have to contend is the process of reconstruction, and in particular, of supplying missing premises. This is one of the reasons that RST is often an inappropriate tool for analysing argumentation Enthymemes — arguments or, specifically, syllogisms with one or more components left implicit — are extremely common, to the extent that the natural language expression of a Modus Ponens argument A, A implies B, therefore B is so frequently contracted through the omission of the major premise leaving just: A, so B that it has led linguists to regard it as a separate form of argument altogether — the Modus Brevis Though there are various patterns to these contractions such as those described by Sadock and in Ref.

This support is provided in allowing new premises not explicitly included in the text to be added to the structure of an argument. The emphasis upon comparison with Rhetorical Structure Theory is quite deliberate. By accepting the diversity not only of language, but also of the interpretation and analysis of language, RST has become a powerful and widely used tool in discourse analysis and computational linguistics, and has played a key role in making common resources available to the research community.

By equipping argument analysis tools with a similar flexibility and tolerance of analytic diversity, the rich variety of approaches in teaching, learning, and research can be preserved whilst at once providing a common interlingua and environment for carrying out those activities. As part of the commitment to supporting diversity, Araucaria has been developed in Java, to support execution on many platforms. When a text file is loaded, the text appears in the left-hand panel.

A portion of this text may be selected with the mouse. If the mouse is then clicked in the large panel on the right, a node corresponding to that portion of the text is created and drawn at the bottom of the panel. When two or more nodes have been defined in this way, they can be connected in pairs by selecting one node with the mouse and dragging the mouse to the other node. The first node selected is the premise of an argument, and the second node is the conclusion.

A simple argument diagram is shown in Fig. Araucaria screenshot. Araucaria supports both convergent and linked arguments Araucaria adopts the terminology of Ref. The procedures for inserting each of these features into a diagram is simple. Although the text in the left panel cannot be edited after it has been loaded into Araucaria, the reconstructed text of a missing premise can be edited within the diagram. A diagram showing all the types of argument supported by Araucaria is shown in Fig.

A larger argument showing various argument types. Cite No. If you usually work with diagrams, you will be interested in downloading Araucaria for free. It's an ideal program to create or reconstruct diagrams. With Araucaria you can study and analyse in depth all the arguments of your diagrams , using a simple and interactive interface. If you start off in this field with Araucaria , you will find it quite easy to become familiar with the reconstruction of arguments, their subsequent integration into diagrams and the application of argumentation schemes.

In the case of teachers and tutors, they will appreciate how easy it is to offer alternative sets of schemes, insert their own examples and analyses.