Workshop Announcement and Call for Papers: CMNA 2011

Date

April 3, 2011

source

The 2011 CMNA workshops will be held concurrently with the 25th AAAI Conference in San Francisco, CA,  August 7-11.

Description

The series of CMNA workshops, since its inception in 2001, has been acting to nurture and provide succor to the ever growing community working in “Argument and Computation”. AI has witnessed a prodigious growth in uses of argumentation throughout many of its sub disciplines: agent system negotiation protocols that demonstrate higher levels of sophistication and robustness; argumentation-based models of evidential relations; groupwork tools that use argument to structure interaction and debate; computer-based learning tools that exploit monological and dialogical argument structures in designing pedagogic environments; decision support systems that build upon argumentation theoretic models of deliberation to better integrate with human reasoning

The CMNA workshop series has seen a notable growth in submissions, and forms a complement to more recent series or events, like the ArgMAS series, begun in 2004, and the nascent COMMA series, which held its first meeting in 2006. CMNA keeps a broader, interdisciplinary emphasis on natural (real) arguments and the computational tools and techniques for modeling, manipulating and exploiting them.

Workshop Topics

The workshops focus on the issue of modeling “natural” argumentation, in terms of:

The characteristics of natural arguments: ontological aspects and cognitive issues.
The use of models from informal logic and argumentation theory, and in particular, approaches to specific schools of thought developed in informal logic and argumentation.
Rhetoric and affect: the role of emotions, personalities, etc. in models of argumentation.
The roles of licentiousness and deceit and the ethical implications of implemented systems demonstrating such features.
The linguistic characteristics of natural argumentation, including discourse markers, sentence format, referring expressions, and style. Persuasive discourse processing (discourse goals and structure, speaker/hearer models, content selection, etc.). Language dependence and multilingual approaches. Empirical work based on corpora looking at these topics are especially welcomed.
Non-monotonic, defeasible and uncertain argumentation.
Natural argumentation and media: visual arguments, multi-modal arguments, spoken arguments.
Models of argumentation in multi-agent systems inspired by or based upon theories of human argument.
Empirically driven models of argument in AI and Law.
Evaluative arguments and their application in AI systems (such as decision support and advice giving).
Issues of domain specificity, and in particular, the independence of argumentation techniques from the domain of application.
Applications of computer supported collaborative argumentation, in realistic domains in which argument plays a key role, including pedagogy, e-democracy and public debate.
Applications of argumentation based systems, including, for example, the pedagogical, health-related, political, and promotional.
Methods to better convey the structure of complex argument, including representation and summarization.
Tools for interacting with structures of argument, including visualization tools and interfaces supporting natural, stylized or formal dialogue.
The building of computational resources such as online corpora related to argumentation.

Submission Information

The workshop encourages submissions in three categories:

Long papers, either reporting on completed work or offering a polemic discussion on a burning issue (up to 10 pages)
Short papers describing work in progress (up to 5 pages)
Demonstration of implemented systems: submissions should be accompanied by written reports (up to 3 pages). Authors should contact the organizers to ensure suitable equipment is available.

It is highly recommended to submit papers using the final camera-ready formatting style specified in the AAAI 2011 Style Guide (except for the number of pages).

Paper submission will be handled by the Easychair conference system. Please submit your paper here.