Simon Parsons

Simon Parsons
University of Lincoln · School of Computer Science

About

546
Publications
65,508
Reads
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14,685
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2013 - July 2015
University of Liverpool
Position
  • Professor (Full)

Publications

Publications (546)
Preprint
Full-text available
Precision agriculture leverages data and machine learning so that farmers can monitor their crops and target interventions precisely. This enables the precision application of herbicide only to weeds, or the precision application of fertilizer only to undernourished crops, rather than to the entire field. The approach promises to maximize yields wh...
Article
Full-text available
Chatbots are conversational software applications designed to interact dialectically with users for a plethora of different purposes. Surprisingly, these colloquial agents have only recently been coupled with computational models of arguments (i.e. computational argumentation), whose aim is to formalise, in a machine-readable format, the ordinary e...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent years witnessed significant performance advancements in deep-learning-driven natural language models, with a strong focus on the development and release of Large Language Models (LLMs). These improvements resulted in better quality AI-generated output but rely on resource-expensive training and upgrading of models. Although different studies...
Article
Current technology has made it possible to automate a number of agricultural processes that were traditionally carried out by humans and now can be entirely performed by robotic platforms. However, there are certain tasks like soft fruit harvesting, where human skills are still required. In this case, the robot's job is to cooperate/collaborate wit...
Article
Full-text available
Advancements and deployments of AI-based systems, especially Deep Learning-driven generative language models, have accomplished impressive results over the past few years. Nevertheless, these remarkable achievements are intertwined with a related fear that such technologies might lead to a general relinquishing of our lives’s control to AIs. This c...
Preprint
Full-text available
Chatbots are conversational software applications designed to interact dialectically with users for a plethora of different purposes. Surprisingly, these colloquial agents have only recently been coupled with computational models of arguments (i.e. computational argu-mentation), whose aim is to formalise, in a machine-readable format, the ordinary...
Article
Full-text available
Weeds pose a persistent threat to farmers’ yields, but conventional methods for controlling weed populations, like herbicide spraying, pose a risk to the surrounding ecosystems. Precision spraying aims to reduce harms to the surrounding environment by targeting only the weeds rather than spraying the entire field with herbicide. Such an approach re...
Preprint
Full-text available
Advancements in machine vision that enable detailed inferences to be made from images have the potential to transform many sectors. Precision agriculture is one such application area. By detecting weeds and inferring crop growth via leaf counts interventions can be applied only where they are needed. This enables farmers to maximise their yields wh...
Article
In this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes two drawbacks of existing approaches. First, our model does not assume that participants agree on the structure of the debate. It does this by allowing participants to express their opinion about all aspects o...
Article
In the last decades, robotic solutions have been introduced in agriculture to improve the efficiency of tasks such as spraying, plowing, and seeding. However, for a more complex task like soft-fruit harvesting, the efficiency of experienced human pickers has not been surpassed yet by robotic solutions. Thus, in the immediate future, human labor wil...
Article
Full-text available
Recent years have witnessed the rise of several new argumentation-based support systems, especially in the healthcare industry. In the medical sector, it is imperative that the exchange of information occurs in a clear and accurate way, and this has to be reflected in any employed virtual systems. Argument Schemes and their critical questions repre...
Thesis
Full-text available
Currently, the Internet and its virtual platforms are the primary forms of communication in our lives. From international to local communities, citizens search for and demand better ways to express their opinion and decide collectively about the world they live in. However, current collective decision making methods have yet to improve to achieve t...
Chapter
Full-text available
Typically in abstract argumentation, one starts with arguments and a defeat relation, and applies some semantics in order to determine the acceptability status of the arguments. We consider the converse case where we have knowledge of the acceptability status of arguments and want to identify a defeat relation that is consistent with the known acce...
Chapter
Full-text available
This demo paper outlines the EQR argument scheme (AS) structure and deploys its instantiations to convey explanations using a chatbot.
Article
Full-text available
More evidence is needed on technology implementation for remote monitoring and self-management across the various settings relevant to chronic conditions. This paper describes the findings of a survey designed to explore the relevance of socio-demographic factors to attitudes towards connected health technologies in a community of patients. Stroke...
Preprint
The evolution of smaller, faster processors and cheaper digital storage mechanisms across the last 4-5 decades has vastly increased the opportunity to integrate intelligent technologies in a wide range of practical environments to address a broad spectrum of tasks. One exciting application domain for such technologies is precision agriculture, wher...
Article
Full-text available
Deception plays a critical role in the dissemination of information, and has important consequences on the functioning of cultural, market-based and democratic institutions. Deception has been widely studied within the fields of philosophy, psychology, economics and political science. Yet, we still lack an understanding of how deception emerges in...
Article
Full-text available
This paper demonstrates how argumentation schemes can be used in decision support systems that help clinicians in making treatment decisions. The work builds on the use of computational argumentation, a rigorous approach to reasoning with complex data that places strong emphasis on being able to justify and explain the decisions that are recommende...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Using AI for agriculture requires the fast transmission and processing of large volumes of data. Cost-effective high speed processing may not be possible on-board agricultural vehicles, and suitably fast transmission may not be possible with older generation wireless communications. In response, the work presented here investigates the use of 5G wi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper describes a hazard analysis for an agricultural scenario where a crop is treated by a robot using UV-C light. Although human-robot interactions are not expected, it may be the case that unauthorized people approach the robot while it is operating. These potential human-robot interactions have been identified and modeled as Markov Decisio...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper describes our work to assure safe autonomy in soft fruit production. The first step was hazard analysis, where all the possible hazards in representative scenarios were identified. Following this analysis, a three-layer safety architecture was identified that will minimise the occurrence of the identified hazards. Most of the hazards are...
Article
Work in robotic phenotyping requires computer vision methods that estimate the number of fruit or grains in an image. To decide what to use, we compared three methods for counting fruit and grains, each method representative of a class of approaches from the literature. These are two methods based on density estimation and regression (single and mu...
Article
People are increasingly employing artificial intelligence as the basis for decision-support systems (DSSs) to assist them in making well-informed decisions. Adoption of DSS is challenging when such systems lack support, or evidence, for justifying their recommendations. DSSs are widely applied in the medical domain, due to the complexity of the dom...
Preprint
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being increasingly deployed in practical applications. However, there is a major concern whether AI systems will be trusted by humans. In order to establish trust in AI systems, there is a need for users to understand the reasoning behind their solutions. Therefore, systems should be able to explain and justify their...
Chapter
On the farm of the future, a human agriculturist collaborates with both human and automated labourers in order to perform a wide range of tasks. Today, changes in traditional farming practices motivate robotics researchers to consider ways in which automated devices and intelligent systems can work with farmers to address diverse needs of farming....
Article
Artificial intelligence (ai) is bringing radical change to our lives. Fostering trust in this technology requires the technology to be transparent, and one route to transparency is to make the decisions that are reached by ais explainable to the humans that interact with them. This paper lays out an exploratory approach to developing explainability...
Preprint
Full-text available
Inspired by e-participation systems, in this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes drawbacks of existing approaches by allowing users to introduce new pieces of information into the discussion, to relate them to existing pieces, and also to express their...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We are working on components that can compute explanations for a model-based ai, in particular a system for ai planning. This short paper sketches the components of the system and discusses some issues that arise when considering how to compute explanations. ACM Reference Format:
Chapter
Prior work has investigated the problem mining arguments from online reviews by classifying opinions based on the stance expressed explicitly or implicitly. An implicit opinion has the stance left unexpressed linguistically while an explicit opinion has the stance expressed explicitly. In this paper, we propose a bipartite graph-based approach to r...
Preprint
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being increasingly used to develop systems that produce intelligent solutions. However, there is a major concern that whether the systems built will be trusted by humans. In order to establish trust in AI systems, there is a need for the user to understand the reasoning behind their solutions and therefore, the syste...
Preprint
Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) is the problem of distributing a set of tasks to a team of robots with the objective of optimising some criteria, such as minimising the amount of time or energy spent to complete all the tasks or maximising the efficiency of the team's joint activity. The exploration of MRTA methods is typically restricted to lab...
Chapter
In argumentation theory, argument schemes are constructs to generalise common patterns of reasoning; whereas critical questions (CQs) capture the reasons why argument schemes might not generate arguments. Argument schemes together with CQs are widely used to instantiate arguments; however when it comes to making decisions, much less attention has b...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Prior work has investigated the problem mining arguments from online reviews by classifying opinions based on the stance expressed explicitly or implicitly. An implicit opinion has the stance left unexpressed linguistically while an explicit opinion has the stance expressed explicitly. In this paper, we propose a bipartite graph-based approach to r...
Chapter
There has been a recent resurgence in the area of explainable artificial intelligence as researchers and practitioners seek to provide more transparency to their algorithms. Much of this research is focused on explicitly explaining decisions or actions to a human observer, and it should not be controversial to say that looking at how humans explain...
Article
This paper describes work to assess the feasibility of using a decision support tool to help patients with chronic conditions, specifically stroke, manage their condition in collaboration with their carers and the health care professionals who are looking after them. The system contains several novel elements: the integration of data from commercia...
Chapter
This paper reports some preliminary work on learning on a physical robot. In particular, we report on an experiment to learn how to strike a ball to hit a target on the ground. We compare learning based just on previous trials with the robot with learning based on those trials plus additional data learnt using a generative adversarial network (GAN)...
Chapter
Recent studies have shown that applying Theory of Mind to agent technologies enables agents to model and reason about other agents’ minds, making them more efficient than agents that do not have this ability or agents that have a more limited ability of modelling others’ minds. Apart from the interesting results of combining Theory of Mind and agen...
Chapter
Applying Theory of Mind to multi-agent systems enables agents to model and reason about other agents’ minds. Recent work shows that this ability could increase the performance of agents, making them more efficient than agents that lack this ability. However, modelling others agents’ minds is a difficult task, given that it involves many factors of...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The development of machines that can tell stories in order to interact with humans or other artificial agents has significant implications in the area of trust and AI. Even more so if we expect such machines to be transparent and explain their reasoning when we interrogate them to see if they should be held accountable. One of these implications is...
Article
Full-text available
Argumentation-based debates are mechanisms that a group can use to resolve conflicting opinions and hence reach agreement. They have many potential applications in on-line communities and other open environments. In this paper, we provide computational infrastructure to support argumentation-based debates, in particular focusing on the problem of h...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This short paper describes the design of the CONSULT system, a decision-support tool intended to help patients suffering from chronic conditions self-manage their health. The system takes input from multiple sources, including commercial wellness sensors and patient's electronic health record, to inform an intelligent back-end that reasons about da...
Chapter
Many systems of structured argumentation explicitly require that the facts and rules that make up the argument for a conclusion be the minimal set required to derive the conclusion. \(\textsc {aspic}^{\mathsf {+}}\) does not place such a requirement on arguments, instead requiring that every rule and fact that are part of an argument be used in its...
Presentation
This workshop invited extended abstracts on ongoing research investigating the impact of argumentation on society at large. http://comma2018.argdiap.pl/wp-content/uploads/Sassoon.pdf
Conference Paper
Full-text available
It is reasonable to assume that in the next few decades, intelligent machines might become much more proficient at socialising. This implies that the AI community will face the challenges of identifying, understanding, and dealing with the different types of social behaviours these intelligent machines could exhibit. Given these potential challenge...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Online reviews have become a popular portal among customers making decisions about purchasing products. A number of corpora of reviews have been widely investigated in NLP in general, and, in particular, in argument mining. This is a subset of NLP that deals with extracting arguments and the relations among them from user-based content. A major pro...
Chapter
In this paper we investigate the links between instantiated argumentation systems and the axioms for non-monotonic reasoning described in [15] with the aim of characterising the nature of argument based reasoning. In doing so, we consider two possible interpretations of the consequence relation, and describe which axioms are met by under each of th...
Article
Argumentation is an important approach in artificial intelligence and multiagent systems, providing a basis for single agents to make rational decisions, and for groups of agents to reach agreements, as well as a mechanism to underpin a wide range of agent interactions. In such work, a crucial role is played by the notion of attack between argument...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
CONSULT is a decision-support framework designed to help patients self-manage chronic conditions and adhere to agreed-upon treatment plans, in collaboration with healthcare professionals. The approach taken employs computational argumentation, a logic-based methodology that provides a formal means for reasoning with evidence by substantiating claim...
Article
Services are configured via policies that capture expected behaviors, but stakeholder requirements can change, making policy errors a surprisingly common occurrence. Aragorn applies formal argumentation to produce policies that balance stakeholder concerns.
Conference Paper
With the decline of rural populations across the globe, much hope is vested in the use of robots in agriculture as a means to sustain food production. This is particularly relevant for high-value crops, such as strawberries, where harvesting is currently very labour-intensive. As part of a larger project to build a robot that is capable of harvesti...
Conference Paper
The work presented here investigates how environmental features can be used to help select a task allocation mechanism from a portfolio in a multi-robot exploration scenario. In particular, we look at clusters of task locations and the positions of team members in relation to cluster centres. In a data-driven approach, we conduct experiments that u...
Conference Paper
In this paper, we present a genetic algorithmic approach to automated auction mechanism design in the context of cat games. This is a follow-up to one piece of our prior work in the domain, the reinforcement learning-based grey-box approach [14]. Our experiments show that given the same search space the grey-box approach is able to produce better a...
Article
Many systems of structured argumentation explicitly require that the facts and rules that make up the argument for a conclusion be the minimal set required to derive the conclusion. ASPIC+ does not place such a requirement on arguments, instead requiring that every rule and fact that are part of an argument be used in its construction. Thus ASPIC+...
Article
In this paper we investigate the links between instantiated argumentation systems and the axioms for non-monotonic reasoning described in [9] with the aim of characterising the nature of argument based reasoning. In doing so, we consider two possible interpretations of the consequence relation, and describe which axioms are met by ASPIC+ under each...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We consider the problem of identifying properties which can relate propositions in opinionated texts that are part of an argument structure. Given a statement or a set of statements, the term stance refers to the overall viewpoint present, whether it is in favour or against the topic in discussion — a form of persuasion as in computational ar-gumen...
Article
Full-text available
In real-world applications, knowledge bases consisting of all the available information for a specific domain, along with the current state of affairs, will typically contain contradictory data, coming from different sources, as well as data with varying degrees of uncertainty attached. An important aspect of the effort associated with maintaining...
Article
Full-text available
Firewalls are an important tool in the provision of network security. Packet filtering firewalls are configured by providing a set of rules that identify how to handle individual data packets that arrive at the firewall. In large firewall configurations, conflicts may arise between these rules. Argumentation provides a way of handling such conflict...
Conference Paper
The work presented here investigates the impact of certain environmental parameters on the performance of a multi-robot team conducting exploration tasks. Experiments were conducted with physical robots and simulated robots, and a diverse set of metrics was computed. The experiments were structured to highlight several factors: (a) single-robot ver...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Enthymemes, that are arguments with missing premises, are common in natural language text. They pose a challenge for the field of argument mining, which aims to extract arguments from such text. If we can detect whether a premise is missing in an argument, then we can either fill the missing premise from similar/related arguments, or discard such e...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Typically, autonomous robot navigation relies on a detailed, accurate map. The associated representations, however, do not readily support human-friendly interaction. The approach reported here offers an alternative: navigation with a spatial model and commonsense qualitative spatial reasoning. Both are based on research about how people experience...
Conference Paper
aspic \(^{+}\) is one of the most widely used systems for structured arguments and includes the use of both strict and defeasible rules. Here we consider using just the defeasible part of aspic \(^{+}\). We show that using the resulting system, it is possible, in a well defined sense, to capture the same information as using aspic \(^{+}\) with str...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
There has been much research on the use of auction-based methods to provide a distributed approach to task allocation for robot teams. Team members bid on tasks based on their locations, and the allocation is based on these bids. The focus of prior work has been on the optimality of the allocation, establishing that auction-based methods perform we...
Article
Full-text available
Optimal navigation for a simulated robot relies on a detailed map and explicit path planning, an approach problematic for real-world robots that are subject to noise and error. This paper reports on autonomous robots that rely on local spatial perception, learning, and commonsense rationales instead. Despite realistic actuator error, learned spatia...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper describes how a cognitive architecture builds a spatial model and navigates from it without a map. Each constructed model is a collage of spatial affordances that describes how the environment has been sensed and traversed. The system exploits the evolving model while it directs an agent to explore the environment. Effective models are l...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
To provide convincing recommendations, which can be fully understood and accepted by a decision-maker, a decisionaider must often engage in an interaction and take the decision maker's responses into account. This feedback can lead to revising the model used to represent the preferences of the decision-maker. Our objective in this paper is to equip...