Paper: Enhancing Statement Evaluation in Argumentation via Multi-labelling Systems

In computational models of argumentation, the justification of statements has drawn less attention than the construction and justification of arguments. As a consequence, significant losses of sensitivity and expressiveness in the treatment of statement statuses can be incurred by otherwise appealing formalisms.

In order to reappraise statement statuses and, more generally, to support a uniform modelling of different phases of the argumentation process we introduce multi-labelling systems, a generic formalism devoted to represent reasoning processes consisting of a sequence of labelling stages. In this context, two families of multi-labelling systems, called argument-focused and statement-focused approach, are identified and compared.

Then they are shown to be able to encompass several prominent literature proposals as special cases, thereby enabling a systematic comparison evidencing their merits and limits.

Further, we show that the proposed model supports tunability of statement justification by specifying a few alternative statement justification labellings, and we illustrate how they can be seamlessly integrated into different formalisms.

Pietro Baroni, Regis Riveret, Enhancing Statement Evaluation in Argumentation via Multi-labelling Systems, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. December 2019.

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