Practical argumentation is intelligent reasoning from an agent's goals and known circumstances , and from an action selected as a means, to arrive at a decision on what action to take. This book will appeal to a wide audience, from designers of multi-agent and robotics systems to social scientists.
During the last decade Argumentation has been gaining importance within Artificial Intelligence especially in multi agent systems. Argumentation is a powerful mechanism for modelling the internal reasoning of an agent. It also provides tools for analysing, designing and implementing sophisticated forms of interaction among rational agents, thus making important contributions to the theory and practice of multiagent dialogues. Application domains include: nonmonotonic reasoning, legal disputes, business negotiation, labor disputes, team formation, scientific inquiry, deliberative democracy, ontology reconciliation, risk analysis, scheduling, and logistics. This volume presents the latest developments in this area at the interface of argumentation theory and multi agent systems. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers from the AAMAS 2008 conference were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on argument-based reasoning, argumentation and dialogue, as well as strategic and pragmatic issues.
This handbook addresses legal reasoning and argumentation from a logical, philosophical and legal perspective. The main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and are analysed in connection with more general types (and problems) of reasoning. Accordingly, the subject matter of the handbook divides in three parts. The first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the general structures and procedures of reasoning and argumentation that are relevant to legal discourse. The third one looks at their instantiations and developments of these aspects of argumentation as they are put to work in the law, in different areas and applications of legal reasoning.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the First International Workshop on Languages, Methodologies and Development Tools for Multi-Agent Systems, LADS 2007, held in Durham, UK, in September 2007. The workshop was part of MALLOW 2007, a federation of workshops on Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organizations. The 15 revised full papers, presented together with 1 invited paper reporting the aims and achievements of the OpenKnowledge project, were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent reasoning and semantics, declarative languages and technologies, methodologies and design, and development frameworks.
This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of six workshops held in conjunction with the 26th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling. Topics include conceptual modeling for life sciences applications, foundations and practices of UML, ontologies and information systems for the semantic Web , quality of information systems, requirements, intentions and goals in conceptual modeling, and semantic and conceptual issues in geographic information systems.
In the study of forms of legal reasoning, logic and argumentation theory long followed separate tracks. `Legal logicians' tended to focus on a deductive reconstruction of justifying a decision, disregarding the dialectical process leading to the chosen justification. Others instead emphasized the adversarial and discretionary nature of legal reasoning, involving reasonable evaluation of alternative choices, and the use of analogical reasoning. Recently, however, developments in Artificial Intelligence and Law have paved the way for overcoming this separation. Logic has widened its scope to defensible argumentation, and informal accounts of analogy and dialectics have inspired the construction of computer programs. Thus the prospect is emerging of an integrated logical and dialectical account of legal argument, adding to the understanding of legal reasoning, and providing a formal basis for computer tools that assist and mediate legal debates while leaving room for human initiative. This book presents contributions to this development. From a logical point of view it covers topics such as evaluating conflicting arguments, weighing reasons, modelling legal disputes as a dialogue game, the role of the burden of proof, the relation between principles, rules, reasons and facts, and the relation between deductive and nondeductive arguments. Written by leading scholars in the field and building on recent developments in logic and Artificial Intelligence, the chapters provide a state-of-the-art account of research on the logical aspects of legal argument.
The investigation of computational models of argument is a rich and fascinating interdisciplinary research field with two ultimate aims: the theoretical goal of understanding argumentation as a cognitive phenomenon by modeling it in computer programs, and the practical goal of supporting the development of computer-based systems able to engage in argumentation-related activities with human users or among themselves. The biennial International Conferences on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA) provide a dedicated forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest advancements in the field, and cover both basic research and innovative applications. This book presents the proceedings of COMMA 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, COMMA 2020 was held as an online event on the originally scheduled dates of 8 -11 September 2020, organised by the University of Perugia, Italy. The book includes 28 full papers and 13 short papers selected from a total of 78 submissions, the abstracts of 3 invited talks and 13 demonstration abstracts. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is reflected, and contributions cover both theory and practice. Theoretical contributions include new formal models, the study of formal or computational properties of models, designs for implemented systems and experimental research. Practical papers include applications to medicine, law and criminal investigation, chatbots and online product reviews. The argument-mining trend from previous COMMA’s is continued, while an emerging trend this year is the use of argumentation for explainable AI. The book provided an overview of the latest work on computational models of argument, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.
In a book that is a blend of text and readings, Martin P. Golding explores legal reasoning from a variety of angles—including that of judicial psychology. The primary focus, however, is on the ‘logic’ of judicial decision making. How do judges justify their decisions? What sort of arguments do they use? In what ways do they rely on legal precedent? Golding includes a wide variety of cases, as well as a brief bibliographic essay (updated for this Broadview Encore Edition).
This edited volume is about how unprejudiced approaches to real human cognition can improve the design of AI. It covers many aspects of human cognition and across 12 chapters the reader can explore multiple approaches about the complexities of human cognitive skills and reasoning, always guided by experts from different but complimentary academic fields. A central concept is explained: blended cognition, the natural skill of human beings for combining constantly different heuristics during their several task-solving activities. Something that was sometimes observed like a problem as “bad reasoning”, is now the central key for the understanding of the richness, adaptability and creativity of human cognition. The topic of this book connects in a significant way with the disciplines of psychology, neurology, anthropology, philosophy, logics, engineering, logics, and AI. In a nutshell: understanding better humans for designing better machines. Any person with interests on natural and artificial reasoning should read this book as a primary source of inspiration and a way to achieve a critical thinking on these topics.
Argumentation, which has long been a topic of study in philosophy, has become a well-established aspect of computing science in the last 20 years. This book presents the proceedings of the fifth conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA), held in Pitlochry, Scotland in September 2014. Work on argumentation is broad, but the COMMA community is distinguished by virtue of its focus on the computational and mathematical aspects of the subject. This focus aims to ensure that methods are sound – that they identify arguments that are correct in some sense – and provide an unambiguous specification for implementation; producing programs that reason in the correct way and building systems capable of natural argument or of recognizing argument. The book contains 24 long papers and 18 short papers, and the 21 demonstrations presented at the conference are represented in the proceedings either by an extended abstract or by association with another paper. The book will be of interest to all those whose work involves argumentation as it relates to artificial intelligence.