Special Theme

In 2024 we solicit contributions on the special theme of “domains of natural argument”.

The special theme should be interpreted broadly, to reflect the wide range of argumentative practices in specialist domains such as law, medicine, natural sciences, economics, sociology, education, public policy, behaviour change, explainable AI, military intelligence, software engineering, implementation science, business and financial communication, etc.

Additionally contributions within this theme might explore various questions:

  • What features (e.g., dialogue models, argumentation schemes, speech acts, rhetorical devices and/or linguistic cues) are particular to a given domain.
  • How do they relate to features of other specialist domains or “everyday” argumentation?
  • How can study of natural argument in a particular domain inform models of natural argument in other domains?
  • How are classical models of natural argument and domain-specific models related to each other?

Contributions to this theme will be invited to submit extended work to a special issue of the Journal of Argument & Computation.

Regular Topics

The CMNA workshop series focuses on the general issue of modelling “natural” argumentation.

Contributions are solicited addressing, but not limited to, the following areas of interest:

  • The characteristics of “natural” arguments (e.g. ontological aspects, cognitive issues, legal aspects).
  • The linguistic characteristics of natural argumentation, including discourse markers, sentence format, referring expressions, and style.
  • The generation of natural argument
  • Corpus argumentation results and techniques
  • Argumentation mining
  • Models of natural legal argument
  • Rhetoric and affect: the role of emotions, personalities, etc. in argumentation.
  • The roles of licentiousness and deceit and the ethical implications of implemented systems demonstrating such features.
  • Natural argumentation in multi-agent systems.
  • Methods to better convey the structure of complex argument, including representation and summarisation.
  • Natural argumentation and media: visual arguments, multi-modal arguments, spoken arguments.
  • Evaluative arguments and their application in AI systems (such as decision-support and advice-giving).
  • Non-monotonic, defeasible and uncertain argumentation.
  • The computational use of models from informal logic and argumentation theory.
  • Computer supported collaborative argumentation, for pedagogy, e-democracy and public debate.
  • Tools for interacting with structures of argument.
  • Applications of argumentation based systems.