Organization responsible: University of Utrecht

People involved:

• Tom van der Weide (PhD student)
• Frank Dignum (coordinator, researcher)
• Gerard Vreeswijk (researcher)
• Henry Prakken (researcher)
• John-Jules Meyer (promotor)

Project description:

Typically, at the early stages of a crisis, decision makers will be confronted with decisions characterized by irreversibility. In addition, communication and decision processes will go across a variety of organizations. The dynamic characteristics of this cross-boundary communication, decision and collaboration are the theme of this project.

In a complex and critical environment such as the one envisioned within ICIS, decisions to take actions may involve exploring both justification and refutation looking at the information available. The ability to form suitable arguments to justify (or refute) a standpoint seems therefore a required ability for the agents that will be part of the ICIS systems. Additionally agents in the ICIS context might be required to convince other agents and/or persons of a course of action. Arguments supporting or attacking possible actions can be given along different lines. E.g. one can argue that everyone does it like that, or that it is “according to the rules”, or that it is the most effective action, etc. This suggests that in any given situation one has to decide which of these ways will be more effective in swaying an audience. Thus an argument to accept or refute a given standpoint may depend not only on the information available, but also, and sometimes heavily, (as it is shown e.g. in the movie “twelve angry men"), on which of this information is actually presented (the line of the argument) and how it is presented.

Our aim is to develop an argumentation framework such that an agent using this framework given a situation (characterised in terms of goals and values of the agents involved, information available to each and possible actions), an audience (characterised in terms of emotional and personality traits) and a standpoint (a proposition to believe, a goal to achieve, or a value to promote) will support the construction of the argument that is best suited to persuade that particular audience, in that particular situation, that the given standpoint is justified (or is to be refuted).

We are particularly interested in investigating disputes involving goals and values and relations between actions, goals and values (whether a given action indeed achieves a given goal or promotes a certain value, whether an action has detrimental side effects with respect to the goals it achieves and values it promotes, etc.) because these are the disputes where different choices for the line of argument (which information is presented and how) may have the largest impact.

This research as two main research questions:

• What personal factors affect the persuasiveness of practical arguments? (literature study)
• How can BDI agents use personal factors as a heuristic to select and present persuasive practical arguments? (argumentation framework and formalization values and personality)

Publications: