Archive for November, 2012

Towards a Catalog of Argumentation Patterns

November 16th, 2012

Argumentation analysis can be simplified by thinking about the patterns used.
But what are the key patterns? Here are two diagrams showing different views.

Rahwan suggests 5 common basic argument structures: single, linked, convergent, serial, and divergent. ((Iyad Rahwan. Mass argumentation and the Semantic Web. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 6(1):29–37, February 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2007.11.007))

Iyad Rahwan. Mass argumentation and the Semantic Web. 2008.

Meanwhile, Wei and Praken give 5 possible argumentative structures that have one or two inferences. ((Bin Wei and Henry Prakken. Defining the structure of arguments with AI models of argumentation. Computational Models of Natural Argument XII at ECAI 2012. Pages 60-64 in Proceedings.))

From Bin Wei and Henry Prakken. Defining the structure of arguments with AI models of argumentation.

Why 5 structures? Five connected structures emerge from having two types of inference — as unit I (single) and unit II (linked) inference. With two inferences of either type, we can make five patterns: ((Definition 9. The types of arguments can be defined as follows:
(1) An argument A is a unit I argument iff A has the form B ⇒ ψ and subargument B is an atomic argument B : φ. We call the inference rule φ ⇒ ψ a unit I inference.
(2) An argument A is a unit II argument iff A has the form B1,…,Bn ⇒ ψ and subarguments A : B1,…,Bn are atomic arguments B1 : φ1 ,. . . ,Bn : φn . We call the inference rule φ1,…,φn ⇒ ψ a unit II inference.
(3) An argument A is a multiple unit I argument iff all inferences r1, . . . , rn in the argument A are unit I inferences.
(4) An argument A is a multiple unit II argument iff all inferences r1, . . . , rn in the argument A are unit II inferences.
(5) An argument A is a mixed argument iff A has at least one unit I subargument and unit II subargument.
We display the diagrams of argument types in Figure 3. For simplicity, we assume n = 2 in these diagrams and show only one case of a mixed argument.))

(1) unit I argument (single)
(2) unit II argument (linked)
(3) multiple unit I argument (serial)
(4) multiple unit II argument
(5) mixed argument

What is interesting is to look at the differences: Rahwen doesn’t cover (4) multiple unit II and (5) mixed arguments. Meanwhile, Wei and Prakken’s list doesn’t include Rahwen’s convergent & divergent argumentation.

So which are the key patterns?

Single and linked arguments are fundamental, and serial arguments are mathematically simple and Rahwen suggests that they are common in use. ((Statistics on argument use would be valuable, but we have limited information about this. Aracuaria DB? Output from argumentation mining?))But the rest?

Convergent & divergent argumentation structures are both candidates: Wei and Prakken don’t cover these, I suspect, since each could be separated into two separate single arguments, which have the same premise (divergent) or conclusion (convergent). These structures can be important in practice: Convergent arguments give multiple reasons for coming to a conclusion — essential when no single reason suffices. The structure of divergent arguments seems to me to be most useful for showing contradictions in diverse conclusions, e.g. for reductio ad absurdum arguments; I’d love a real-world example of a divergent argument where keeping this structure is important.

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Altmetrics can help surface quality content: Jason Priem on the Decoupled Journal as the achievable future of scholarly communication

November 4th, 2012

Jason Priem has a wonderful slidedeck on how to smoothly transition from today’s practices in scientific communication to the future. Here is my reading of the argument given in Jason’s slides:

Communicating science is a central and essential part of doing science, and we have always used the best technology available.
Yet currently, there are several problems with journals, the primary form of scholarly communication.

Journal publication is

  • Slow
  • Closed
  • Hard to innovate
  • and has

  • Restrictive format: function follows form
  • Inconsistent quality control

These problems are fixable, if we realize that journals serve four traditional functions:

  1. Registration
  2. Archiving
  3. Dissemination
  4. Certification

By decoupling these functions, into an a la carte publishing menu, we can fix the scholarly communication system. Decoupled scholarly outlets already exist. Jason mentions some outlets (I would say these mainly serve registration functions, maybe also dissemination ones):

  • ArXiv
  • Math Overflow
  • SSRN
  • Faculty of 1000 Research
  • the blag-o-sphere

Jason doesn’t mention here — but we could add to this list — systems for data publishing, e-science workflow, and open notebook science; these may fulfil registration and archiving functions. Also, among existing archiving systems, we could add the journal archiving functions of LOCKSS is the main player I’m familiar with.

To help with the certification functions, we have altmetrics tools like Impact Story (Jason’s Sloan Founded project with Heather Piwowar).

Jason’s argument well worth reading in full; it’s a well-articulated argument for decoupling journal functions, with some detailed descriptions of altmetrics. The core argument is very solid, and of wide interest: Unlike previous articulations for “pre-publication peer review”, this argument will make sense to everyone who believes in big data, I think. There are other formats: video of the talk ((Thanks to Siegfriend Handschuh, who suggested the video of Jason giving this talk at Purdue.)) and a draft article called “Decoupling the scholarly journal” ((by Jason Priem and Bradley M. Hemminger, under review for the Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience special issue “Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review”)).


Briefly noted in some of my earlier tweets.

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