jodischneider.com/blog

A great image “Four types of evidence” appears in a recent paper on probabalistic argumentation schemes¹. The delineation of 4 types of evidence² serves the larger goal of the paper — which is to describe how to combine evidence of different types.

1. ‘Dempster-Shafer Argument Schemes‘ by Yuqing Tang, Nir Oren, Simon Parsons, and Katia Sycara (2013) in Proceedings of ArgMAS 2013. [↩]
2. These, the authors mention, were drawn from an earlier technical report: K. Stentz and S. Ferson. Combination of evidence in Dempster-Shafer theory. Technical Report SAND 2002-0835, Sandia National Laboratories, 2002. See especially pages 10-13. The context in that technical report, is sensor fusion using Dempster-Shafer Theory, which as I have since learned, is a common approach to combination of evidence. [↩]

Last March¹ I gave a reading group talk about knowledge representations of online disputes:

Titled “Turning social disputes into knowledge representations”, the talk was based primarily on two papers:

• Toni and Torroni. Bottom-up Argumentation. In: First International Workshop on the Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation 2011 (TAFA), 16-22 July, 2011, Barcelona, Spain. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ft/PAPERS/tafaPT.pdf
• Benn, Buckingham Shum, Domingue, and Mancini. Ontological Foundations for Scholarly Debate Mapping Technology. In: 2nd International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA ’08), 28-30 May, 2008, Toulouse, France. http://oro.open.ac.uk/11939/

Online argumentation, and particularly knowledge representation from argumentation, is the overarching theme of my dissertation at DERI and as I get together the overall argument, I’ve been looking through my old slidedecks. My previous reading group talk, from November 2011, was about Using Controlled Natural Language and First Order Logic to improve e-consultation discussion forums, based on several papers by Adam Wyner and his colleagues; more recently Adam and I have started a fruitful collaboration, funded in part by the COST action on argumentation and a Short-Term Travel Fellowship from Science Foundation Ireland.

1. March 28, 2012 [↩]

I’m very pleased to share our “A Review of Argumentation for the Social Semantic Web“.

You are very warmly invited to review this paper. You can post the review as a comment to the manuscript page publicly at SWJ’s website. Informal comments by email are also welcome.

Open review

I adore SWJ’s open review process: publicly available manuscripts are useful. In 11 months the landing page has had “1208 reads” and I’m sure that not all of those are mine! Further, knowing who reviewed a paper can add credibility to the process. (It means quite a lot to me when Simon Buckingham-Shum says “I anticipate that this will become a standard reference for the field.”!)

Two earlier versions

The paper evolved from my first year Ph.D. report. In the process of defining my Ph.D. topic, I reviewed the state-of-art of argumentation for the Social Semantic Web. This was further developed in conversations with my coauthors, my colleague Tudor Groza and my advisor Alexandre Passant.

The outdated first journal submission and second journal submission are available; May’s reviews refer to the first version. A cover letter responding to the reviews summarizes what has changed. Shared since I am always encouraged by seeing how others’ work and ideas have developed over time!

So read the most recent version, and let us know what you think!

A few weeks ago, I noticed something new on YouTube: an “I dislike this” button.

I wonder how long that’s been there?

When I talk about online argumentation, a frequent comment is “too bad there’s only +1 and Like; we need more expressivity”.

See related discussions:

• Misusing like
• Mood classification on GetSatisfaction
• Using reactions instead of comments on blogs