Arguments, Values and Baseballs

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• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool
• Thursday 23 May 2013, 16:00-17:00
• G29, Mech Eng .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact .

Host: Behzad Bordbar

Coffee will be served at 3:15pm at room 123 (School of Computer Science), followed by the one-hour seminar at 4pm (G29, Mechanical Engineering).

One approach to handling non-monotonic reasoning is through modelling arguments that agents can exchange in order to decide what to believe or how to act. A popular method of argument modelling is argumentation frameworks in which arguments are evaluated against how well they defend themselves from the attack of other arguments. However, in such frameworks arguments are defined to be of an abstract, structureless nature and the question arises as to where the arguments come from. One answer is that they can be generated from instantiations of argumentation schemes, which represent stereotypical patterns of reasoning and supply contextual information about a topic under consideration. In this talk I show how these two argumentation techniques – argumentation schemes and argumentation frameworks – can be linked to model scenarios where agents need to make decisions about what to do. I demonstrate the approach with an application that models the reasoning in a particular legal case and distinguishes the justification of facts, based on the reliability of their sources, from the justification of choices about the interpretation of the law, based on qualitative value preferences. The legal case concerns a dispute over ownership of a baseball and I show how the formal analysis can provide the outcome as given in the actual case.

This talk is part of the Computer Science Departmental Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• G29, Mech Eng
• computer sience

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