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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

• dan@csc.liv.ac.uk

• Questions?