Content uploaded by Luca Longo
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Luca Longo on Feb 01, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
Intelligenza Artificiale 13 (2019) 121–122
DOI 10.3233/IA-190035
IOS Press
121
Preface to the Special Issue on Advances
in Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence
Now at the forefront of automated reasoning, argu-
mentation has become a key research topic within
Artificial Intelligence. It involves the investigation of
those activities for the production and exchange of
arguments, where arguments are attempts to persuade
someone of something by giving reasons for accept-
ing a particular conclusion or claim as evident. The
study of argumentation has been the focus of attention
of philosophers and scholars, from Aristotle and clas-
sical rhetoric to the present day. The computational
study of arguments has emerged as a field of research
in AI in the last two decades, mainly fuelled by the
interest from scholars in logics, non-monotonic and
epistemic reasoning, and in related disciplines such
as Law, Sociology and Computational Linguistics.
This special issue collects a selection of five papers
from the 2nd Workshop on Advances In Argumenta-
tion In Artificial Intelligence, co-located with AI*IA
2018, the 17th International Conference of the Italian
Association for Artificial Intelligence held in Trento
in November 2018. The workshop was organized as
part of the activities of the Argumentation in Artifi-
cial Intelligence Working Group. The Argumentation
Group is a working group of the Associazione Italiana
per l’Intelligenza Artificiale (AI*IA) whose gen-
eral goal is to promote Italian scientific activities
in the field of Argumentation in Artificial Intelli-
gence, and foster collaborations between research
groups. The selected papers discuss theoretical foun-
dations in argumentation as well as challenges and
real-world problems for which argumentation may
represent a viable AI-paradigm. Each submission
underwent a single-blind peer-review process and the
five accepted articles were reviewed by at least two
independent expert reviewers.
Much work in computational models of argument
is centered on Dung’ seminal 1995 paper “On the
acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role
in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and
n-person games.”. On the one hand, this is reflected
by the papers presented in this special issue, with four
out of five papers describing works directly linked to
Dung’s abstract framework or to its extensions. On
the other hand, the papers also testify the variety and
richness of the current state-of-the-art of argumen-
tation studies, which extends and goes far beyond
Dung’s work, proposing research combining natural
language processing and probabilistic reasoning with
abstract argumentation
The papers by Flesca, Dondio and Longo, and
Taticchi and Bistarelli are theoretical works in the
area of computational argumentation. The paper by
Flesca examines the problem of efficiently computing
the probability of the extensions of bipolar proba-
bilistic argumentation frameworks, proposing a set
of more efficient and empirically-tested algorithms.
The paper by Dondio and Longo introduces a novel
abstract argumentation semantics. Inspired by the
ambiguity blocking semantics of defeasible logic,
the authors propose a semantics where the unde-
cided label assigned to some arguments could be
blocked instead of being propagated to attacked argu-
ments. The paper by Taticchi and Bistarelli proposes
a cooperative-game approach to share acceptability
and rank arguments of an argumentation framework.
The paper by Gobbo et al. proposes a new method for
annotating arguments expressed in natural language,
called adpositional argumentation. By doing so, they
provide the guidelines for designing a gold standard
corpus that could benefit studies in argumentation
mining and arguments definition.
The paper by Pazienza et al. proposes an interest-
ing application of abstract argumentation to financial
predictions. The authors design a framework combin-
ing natural language processing along with abstract
argumentation techniques to automatically extract
ISSN 1724-8035/19/$35.00 © 2019 – IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved
122 Preface to the Special Issue on Advances in Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence
relevant arguments from Earning Conference Call
transcripts, weight such arguments and produce a
final advice aimed to anticipate and predict analysts’
recommendations.
Finally, the Editors are like to acknowledge the
work of the members of the Programme Committee
whose invaluable expertise and efforts have led to the
selection of the papers included in this special issue.
Last but not least, the editors would like to thank all
the authors that have contributed to this special issue.
Editors
Dr. Pierpaolo Dondio
Dr. Luca Longo
Technological University Dublin,
School of Computer Science,
Prof. Stefano Bistarelli
University of Perugia,
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Dublin and Perugia, November 2019
Accepted Papers:
Dondio, Longo,
Beyond Reasonable Doubt: a Proposal for
Undecidedness Blocking in Abstract Argumentation
Taticchi, Bistarelli,
Power Index-Based Semantics for Ranking
Arguments in Abstract Argumentation Frameworks
Gobbo, Benini, Wagemans,
Annotation with Adpositional Argumentation:
Guidelines for building a Gold Standard Corpus of
argumentative discourse
Pazienza, Grossi, Grasso, Palmieri, Zito, Ferilli,
An Abstract Argumentation Approach for the
Prediction of Analysts’ Recommendations
following Earnings Conference Calls
Flesca,
Efficiently computing extensions’ probabilities over
probabilistic Bipolar Abstract Argumentation
Frameworks