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Political Engagement Through Tools for
Argumentation
Dan Cartwright and Katie Atkinson
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK
Presentation to COMMA 2008
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Overview
• Background of e-Democracy and current trends
• Overview of Parmenides
• Tools to support and extend Parmenides
• Discussion of future work and concluding remarks
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e-Democracy
• Focuses on the use of computing technologies in enhancing democratic processes
• Availability of computers & internet access
• Mobilisation of electorate
• Driven by:
• Exploitation of technology
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• e-Consultation systems (Macintosh et al., 2006)
Current Trends
• Highland Youth Voice
• Ur’say
• Support and encourage political participation of young people in Scotland
• Online policy-debating forum
• Online voting system
• Single-themed discussion forum
• Debate is analysed and report produced
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Current Trends
• e-Petitions allow users to create and “sign” petitions over the internet
• Example below based on The Fox Hunting Debate
• UK government introduced an e-Petitions website in 2004
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• e-Petitions suffer from similar problems to paper-based counterparts
• We do not know which part(s) of the petition the signatory agrees or disagrees with
• Signatories have to agree with “all or nothing”
Current Trends
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Current Trends• Structured tools
• Tools for argument visualisation
• Example: Araucaria (Reed & Rowe, 2003)
• Tools for decision support
• Example: Zeno (Gordon & Karacapilidis, 1997)
• Issues with ease of use by laypersons
• Visualise textual arguments
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Parmenides – Overview
• An online discussion forum (K. Atkinson et al., 2004)
• Intended as an e-Democracy application • Government presents policy proposals to public together with a justification
• Users submit their critique of the proposal
• Based on an argument scheme for reasoning about action selection and associated set of critical questions
• Aims to provide structure to debate whilst remaining easy to use
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Parmenides – Argument Scheme
• Parmenides is based on an argument scheme for persuasive argument about action selection
• AS1 argument scheme:
“ In the current circumstances R, we should perform action A, which will result in new circumstances S, which will realise goal G, which will promote some value V ”
• Argument schemes represent stereotypical patterns of reasoning
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Parmenides – Critical Questions
• Challenge the presumptions in instantiations of the argument scheme
• Used to determine which parts of the initial position the user disagrees with
• Examples:
• Are the circumstances as described?
• Does the goal promote the value?
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Parmenides – Latest Developments
• Parmenides was first implemented to model the Iraq War Debate
• Since extended to model further debates, such as the Fox Hunting Debate
• Tools to analyse debate data
• Tools for demographic profiling
• Tools for dynamic debate creation
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Parmenides – Critique
• The Critique section of the website allows the user to critique each element of the initial position
• Achieved by systematically considering Critical Questions
• User is not aware that they are using critical questions or being lead through a particular path: they can respond with “yes/no” answers
• Underlying structure hidden from user to prevent confusion
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Parmenides – Critique (2)
• The above is an instantiation of a Critical Question associated with the argument scheme
• This CQ asks whether the user believes that the Circumstances stated in the initial position are true
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Parmenides – Alternative Position
• Users can submit an alternative position to the debate
• User does this by instantiating an instance of the AS1 argument scheme
Circumstances: The ban is not enforced correctly
Action: Improve policing of the ban
Goals: Prevent public contravention of the ban
Values: Animal welfare, Law enforcement
• Example alternative position from the fox hunting debate:
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Parmenides – Alternative Position (2)
• The user must choose elements of their position from a drop-down menu
• Allows easy analysis of results and prevents abuse
• However, it does restrict users’ expressiveness
• To overcome this: some free text input
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Parmenides Java Application (1)
• Consists of 2 tools
• Critique statistics tool
• Displays the results in the form of an Argument Framework, showing arguments and attacks between them
• Analyses user critiques of the argument’s initial position
• Alternative position analysis tool
• Displays results as a Value-based Argument Framework
• Analyses alternative positions submitted by users
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• Critique statistics tool
Parmenides Java Application (2)
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Critique Statistics Analysis• Each statement is broken down into its constituent elements
• Each branch consists of a statement and a counterstatement
• The numbers above each node represent the number of users who agree with the element
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Critique Statistics Analysis
• Textual summary is also available
• Agreement shown as percentages
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Parmenides Java Application (3)
• Second tool: Alternative position analysis tool
• Displays a Value-based Argumentation Framework (Bench-Capon, 2003)
• From this, we can determine justifiable arguments
• VAFs are an extension to Dung’s AFs, in which we represent the social values promoted by each argument
• Determine which attacks succeed by applying a preference ordering over the values
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Parmenides Java Application (4)• Alternative position analysis tool
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Parmenides Debate Creator
• Easy to add new debates
• Little technical knowledge required
• Consistent appearance
• System tested with a small number of new debates
• e.g. Speed Camera Debate, Fox Hunting Debate
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Parmenides Profiler• Allows demographic profiling of users
• Users can submit information about themselves
• Users optionally log into profiler before participating in debate
Profiler
Debate
Debate
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Issues
• Analysis of demographic profile data
• Enhance free-text input and analysis
• Security
• Manipulation of results
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Conclusion and Future Work
• Implement other Argument Schemes in Parmenides
• Field trials
• Parmenides aims to provide a balance between structure and ease of use
• Investigate how these schemes interact
• Example: Argument from Expert Opinion
• We have described Parmenides and a number of tools to enhance the original system
• Future work is planned
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Thankyou for your attention
• The Parmenides system can be used at http://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~parmenides
• For further information on the topics discussed:
• http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~dan
• Questions?