Argumentation schemes in AI: A literature review. Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Argumentation schemes [35,80,91] are a relatively recent notion that continues an extremely ancient debate on one of the foundations of human reasoning, human comprehension, and obviously human argumentation, i.e., the topics. To understand the revolutionary nature of Walton's work on this subject matter, it is necessary to place it in the debate that it continues and contributes to, namely a view of logic that is much broader than the formalistic perspective that has been adopted from the 20th century until nowadays. With his book Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning, Walton attempted to start a dialogue between three different fields or views on human reasoning -one (argumentation theory) very recent, one (dialectics) very ancient and with a very long tradition, and one (formal logic) relatively recent, but dominating in philosophy. Argumentation schemes were proposed as dialectical instruments, in the sense that they represented arguments not only as formal relations, but also as pragmatic inferences, as they at the same time depend on what the interlocutors share and accept in a given dialogical circumstance, and affect their dialogical relation.In this introduction, the notion of argumentation scheme will be analyzed in detail, showing its different dimensions and its defining features which make them an extremely useful instrument in Artificial Intelligence. This theoretical background will be followed by a literature review on the uses of the schemes in computing, aimed at identifying the most important areas and trends, the most promising proposals, and the directions of future research.

Argumentation Schemes for Blockchain Deanonymisation

“…Argumentation schemes [12], a way to classify arguments according to their underlying principles of convincingness, have been influential in the argumentation theory and the artificial intelligence community [13]. They present the various types of arguments as informal deduction rules, together with accompanying critical questions, to aid a human reasoner in evaluating arguments of a particular type.…”

Sketching the vision of the Web of Debates

“…Building on the most influential model of arguments in the last decades, Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (Dung, 1995), there have been some attempts to formalize features of realistic argumentation, such as the audience (Hunter, 2015), the values that arguments promote (Bench-Capon, 2003), preferences (Amgoud and Vesic, 2014), trust (Villata et al, 2013), the argument strength (Amgoud et al, 2022), the context of argumentation (Brewka and Eiter, 2009), uncertain arguments (Hunter, 2013), commonsense arguments (Vassiliades et al, 2020), enthymemes (Black and Hunter, 2008), and persuasion dialogues (Prakken, 2009). There is also some promising research on the formalization of argumentation schemes (Verheij, 2003;Reed and Walton, 2005;Prakken et al, 2015;Wyner, 2016;Panisson et al, 2021), and more generally on the use of argumentation schemes in AI (Macagno, 2021). The study of what contributes to the persuasiveness or the quality an argument has recently started but is growing fast.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Artificial intelligence is certainly the field that was most receptive of Walton's insights, which were used in several research trends such as multiagent systems, argument diagramming and representation, argument mining, argument assistance and decision support systems (Macagno 2021;Reed 2021). Walton has inspired ways for autonomous systems to take a step closer to represent or interpret natural dialogue.…”