Practical argumentation is intelligent reasoning from an agent's goals and known circumstances , and from an action selected as a means, to arrive at a decision on what action to take. This book will appeal to a wide audience, from designers of multi-agent and robotics systems to social scientists.

This handbook addresses legal reasoning and argumentation from a logical, philosophical and legal perspective. The main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and are analysed in connection with more general types (and problems) of reasoning. Accordingly, the subject matter of the handbook divides in three parts. The first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the general structures and procedures of reasoning and argumentation that are relevant to legal discourse. The third one looks at their instantiations and developments of these aspects of argumentation as they are put to work in the law, in different areas and applications of legal reasoning.

During the last decade Argumentation has been gaining importance within Artificial Intelligence especially in multi agent systems. Argumentation is a powerful mechanism for modelling the internal reasoning of an agent. It also provides tools for analysing, designing and implementing sophisticated forms of interaction among rational agents, thus making important contributions to the theory and practice of multiagent dialogues. Application domains include: nonmonotonic reasoning, legal disputes, business negotiation, labor disputes, team formation, scientific inquiry, deliberative democracy, ontology reconciliation, risk analysis, scheduling, and logistics. This volume presents the latest developments in this area at the interface of argumentation theory and multi agent systems. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers from the AAMAS 2008 conference were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on argument-based reasoning, argumentation and dialogue, as well as strategic and pragmatic issues.

In the study of forms of legal reasoning, logic and argumentation theory long followed separate tracks. `Legal logicians' tended to focus on a deductive reconstruction of justifying a decision, disregarding the dialectical process leading to the chosen justification. Others instead emphasized the adversarial and discretionary nature of legal reasoning, involving reasonable evaluation of alternative choices, and the use of analogical reasoning. Recently, however, developments in Artificial Intelligence and Law have paved the way for overcoming this separation. Logic has widened its scope to defensible argumentation, and informal accounts of analogy and dialectics have inspired the construction of computer programs. Thus the prospect is emerging of an integrated logical and dialectical account of legal argument, adding to the understanding of legal reasoning, and providing a formal basis for computer tools that assist and mediate legal debates while leaving room for human initiative. This book presents contributions to this development. From a logical point of view it covers topics such as evaluating conflicting arguments, weighing reasons, modelling legal disputes as a dialogue game, the role of the burden of proof, the relation between principles, rules, reasons and facts, and the relation between deductive and nondeductive arguments. Written by leading scholars in the field and building on recent developments in logic and Artificial Intelligence, the chapters provide a state-of-the-art account of research on the logical aspects of legal argument.

by Michael G. Dyer Natural language processing (NLP) is an area of research within Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerned with the comprehension and generation of natural language text. Comprehension involves the dynamic construction of conceptual representations, linked by causal relationships and organized/indexed for subsequent retrieval. Once these conceptual representations have been created, comprehension can be tested by means of such tasks as paraphrasing, question answering, and summarization. Higher-level cognitive tasks are also modeled within the NLP paradigm and include: translation, acquisition of word meanings and concepts through reading, analysis of goals and plans in multi-agent environments (e. g. , coalition and counterplanning behavior by narrative characters), invention of novel stories, recognition of abstract themes (such as irony and hypocrisy), extraction of the moral or point of a story, and justification/refutation of beliefs through argumentation. The robustness of conceptually-based text comprehension systems is directly related to the nature and scope of the knowledge constructs applied during conceptual analysis of the text. Until recently, conceptually-based natural language systems were developed for, and applied to, the task of narrative comprehension (Dyer, 1983a; Schank and Abelson, 1977; Wilensky, 1983). These systems worked by recognizing the goals and plans of narrative characters, and. using this knowledge to build a conceptual representation of the narrative, xx UNDERSTANDING EDITORIAL TEXT including actions and intentions which must be inferred to complete the representation. A large portion of text appearing in newspapers and magazines, however, is editorial in nature.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Logic and Argumentation, CLAR 2020, held in Hangzhou, China, in April 2020. The 14 full and 7 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers cover the focus of the CLAR series, including formal models of argumentation, logics for decision making and uncertainreasoning, formal models of evidence, con rmation, and justi cation, logics forgroup cognition and social network, reasoning about norms, formal representationsof natural language and legal texts, as well as applications of argumentationon climate engineering.

Argumentation has traditionally been studied across a number of fields, notably philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics and jurisprudence. The study of computational models of argumentation is a more recent endeavor, bringing together researchers from traditional fields and computer science and engineering within a rich, interdisciplinary matrix. Computational models of argumentation have been identified and used since the 1980s, and more recently an important role for argumentation in leading to principled decisions has emerged in several settings. This book presents the proceedings of COMMA 2022 the 9th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument, held in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, during 14 - 16 September 2022. The book contains 27 regular papers and 16 demo papers from a total of 75 submissions, as well as 3 invited talks from Prof Paul Dunne (University of Liverpool), Prof Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt), and Prof Antonis Kakas (University of Cyprus), which reflect the diverse nature of the field. Papers are a mix of theoretical and practical contributions; theoretical contributions include new formal models, the study of formal or computational properties of models, design for implemented systems and experimental research; practical papers include applications to law, machine learning and explainability. Abstract and structured accounts of argumentation are covered, as are relations between different accounts. Many papers focus on the evaluation of arguments or their conclusions given a body of arguments, with a continuation of a recent trend to study gradual or probabilistic notions of evaluation. The book offers an overview of recent and current research and will be of interest to all those working with computational models of argumentation.