Argumentation Research Articles

Secondary students’ beliefs about English L2 speaking fluency

Research findings on beliefs in second language acquisition (SLA) suggest that beliefs can have a great impact on language learners’ approach to learning, the manner in which they complete language learning tasks, and their ability to complete those tasks and achieve their goals (Griffiths &Soruç 2020). This study explores secondary students’ beliefs about English L2 speaking fluency, their own performance on argumentative dialogues, and possible changes in these beliefs over an eight-month period. Speaking fluency is a multifaceted construct and it is a widely used term in both everyday and research contexts (Tavakoli& Wright 2020). These factors might result in the coexistence of multiple conceptualisations of fluency in a given context. This study argues that this coexistence might also entail inconsistent and even contradictory beliefs about speaking fluency and the components that need to be developed to achieve it. Moreover, these beliefs might change over time. The participants were twelve secondary students in an English bilingual programme (16-year-olds: 11 females and 1 male) who audio-recorded their English L2 argumentative dialogues throughout a school year (10-13 discussions over the eight months). They completed reflective journals in Hungarian, in which they answered questions on how they felt during the dialogues, what areas they felt good and bad at, and what and how they wanted to develop in the future. In addition, they completed a qualitative questionnaire at the beginning and end of the research which focused on their conceptualisation of speaking fluency, the factors they considered important, and their language learning habits and background. The findings showed that the participants had diverse and sometimes contradictory beliefs about speaking fluency and the components that are important to develop, and that these beliefs also changed over time for some participants. / Keywords: beliefs about speaking fluency, introspective methods, reflective journals, experience sampling

Neighborhood-based argumental community support in the context of multi-topic debates

The formal characterization of abstract argumentation has allowed the study of many exciting characteristics of the argumentation process. Nevertheless, while helpful in many aspects, abstraction diminishes the knowledge representation capabilities available to describe naturally occurring features of argumentative dialogues; one of these elements is the consideration of the topics involved in a discussion. In studying dialogical processes, participants recognize that some topics are closely related to the original issue; in contrast, others are more distant from the central subject or refer to unrelated matters. Consequently, it is reasonable to study different argumentation semantics that considers a discussion's focus to evaluate acceptability. In this work, we introduce the necessary representational elements required to reflect the focus of a discussion. We propose a novel extension of the semantics for multi-topic abstract argumentation frameworks, acknowledging that every argument has its own zone of relevance in the argumentation framework, leading to the concepts of neighborhoods and communities of legitimate defenses. Furthermore, other semantic elaborations are defined and discussed around this structure.

Development of an intelligent assistant for selection of goods in the process of dialogue with the user

This article is devoted to the development of methods for creating intelligent assistants. Intelligent assistants can be used in call centers to solve customer problems, to solve technical support tasks, to help people with disabilities, to help in choosing goods, etc. We consider intelligent assistants that engage in argumentative dialogue with users, aimed at finding goods and services that maximally satisfy users’ wants and needs. The development of the intelligent assistant is based on a four-level model of the subject domain and a semantic model of the user. The system under development automates the process of search and decision justification through the reuse of domain cases: accumulated knowledge about previous dialogues with users. This gives the system we developed an advantage over existing analogues, which are incapable of reusing knowledge about previous dialogues. The paper develops a case-based approach to building an intelligent system capable of reasoning about its responses. For this purpose, an argumentation graph is constructed, methods for structuring domain cases are developed, and ontological homomorphisms are used to transform the available domain cases into a finished solution. A description of model-theoretical methods for constructing intelligent assistants is presented. The cases of goods, users and dialogues of an intelligent assistant with users are formally described in the form of partial models. The transformation of domain cases and similarity of cases are formalized using ontological homomorphisms of partial models. The purpose of the developed dialogue system is not only to select a solution according to the user’s request, but also to find out the tasks that the user is going to solve, to analyze his argumentation, and then to justify the proposed solution to the user, to show that this particular product or service will be able to meet his needs.

Argumentation effect of a chatbot for ethical discussions about autonomous AI scenarios

This paper explores the potential of a German-language chatbot to engage users in argumentative dialogues on ethically sensitive topics. Utilizing an argumentative knowledge graph, the chatbot is equipped to engage in discussions on the ethical implications of autonomous AI systems in hypothetical future scenarios in the fields of medicine, law, and self-driving cars. In a study with 178 student participants, we investigated the chatbot’s argumentation effect—its ability to offer new perspectives, gain user acceptance, and broaden users’ viewpoints on complex issues. The results indicated a substantial argumentation effect, with 13–21% of participants shifting their opinions to more moderate stances after interacting with the chatbot. This shift demonstrates the system’s effectiveness in fostering informed discourse and increasing users’ understanding of AI ethics. While the chatbot was well-received, with users acknowledging the quality of its arguments, we identified opportunities for improvement in its argument recognition capabilities. Despite this, our results indicate the chatbot’s potential as an educational tool in engaging users with the ethical dimensions of AI technology and promoting informed discourse.

Hierarchical graph fusion network and a new argumentative dataset for multiparty dialogue discourse parsing

Discourse parsing in multi-party dialogue aims to extract the relationships between elementary discourse units (EDUs) such as arguments and utterances, and has numerous applications like chatbots or virtual assistants. Two significant challenges have been encountered in previous works: the obstacles in fusing various contexts in the modeling; and the lack of argumentative dialogue datasets in this field. To tackle context fusion challenges in the modeling, we introduce the Hierarchical Graph Fusion Network (HGFN). This method introduces sufficient contexts by hierarchically modeling the dialogue and minimizes context noise through a novel routing mechanism. It specifically: (1) Encodes multiple levels of contexts using hierarchical graph neural networks. During this stage, the router allows information exchange across different levels, expanding the model’s receptive field in dialogue. (2) Fuses matching signals from multiple levels of contexts with a fusion network. Here, the router restricts the information flows to the same context level, efficiently minimizing noise from irrelevant context. Furthermore, despite the significance of argumentative multi-party dialogue in real-world applications, this area remains largely unexplored due to dataset scarcity. To address this challenge, we develop two meticulously annotated datasets, MRDL and MRDR. Unlike the prevailing datasets that primarily focus on short and colloquial conversations, our datasets feature intricate argumentative dialogues and are publicly accessible at https://github.com/AI0Research/MRDL-and-MRDR. Our new datasets and the HGFN model could promote further advancements in this field. Extensive experiments are conducted and it is revealed that the HGFN model surpasses the state-of-the-art, particularly in complex, argumentative dialogues.

Pragma-dialectical perspective to intercultural discussion as communicative activity

The core idea of Pragma-dialectical Theory is critical discussion which means resolving disagreement via argumentative dialogues. The Pragmatic-dialectic Model describing critical discussion has not only reasonableness and validness in logic, but also rhetorical effectiveness and pragmatic properties in intra-cultural context. However, the model cannot appropriately describe intercultural discussion since the discussants try to negotiate both in meaning and in divergence. People from different cultures do not necessarily behave pragmatically in the same way. In order to better describe the process of intercultural discussion, an exploratory approach was taken to first propose modifications of the model and then to confirm the modified model in a case study. The modifications include two aspects: first, its rhetorical and pragmatic properties can be expanded by taking Burke’s “Identification” and by replacing “speech acts” with more comprehensive “pragmatic acts”; second, the argumentation stage can be explored further with “motivation” and “mediation” added to the model. The case study reveals that the discussants with the motivation to seek common substances could take proper pragmatic acts to negotiate on certain substances, and that the mediation by the third party and by the discussants exerted influence both on the motivation and on the pragmatic acts. The modified model is expected to broaden the application scope of Pragma-dialectical theory to intercultural communication, and to better explain many kinds of intercultural discussions.

Effects of chatbot-assisted in-class debates on students’ argumentation skills and task motivation

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have led to the development of chatbots capable of engaging in argumentative dialogues and debates with human users. Although some studies have investigated the use of such chatbots to facilitate argumentation learning outside of the classroom, their integration into in-class learning activities remains largely unexplored. In this study, we developed a novel task design, chatbot-assisted in-class debates (CaIcD), for argumentation learning. In the task design, the students interacted with an argumentative chatbot named Argumate before engaging in debates with their classmates. During their interaction, the chatbot helped the students to generate ideas for supporting their position and predict opposing viewpoints. This study investigated the effects of CaIcD on students' argumentation skills and task motivation. Forty-four Chinese undergraduate students from two classes participated in this study. To examine the effects on argumentation skills in terms of structural complexity and argument quality, we used a pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design. Quade's test results revealed that participation in CaIcD enabled the students to use more claims, data, and warrants to generate arguments and participation in CaIcD led to more organised, sufficient, and elaborated arguments. However, no significant effects on overall structural complexity were found. Moreover, to understand the students' task motivation towards CaIcD, a within-subjects comparison design was employed. The results of the Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicated that the students had a higher level of enjoyment and exerted more effort when engaging in CaIcD than when performing conventional learning tasks. Moreover, the students perceived their performance in CaIcD to be as successful as that in conventional learning tasks, although the CaIcD task presented more challenges to them. However, no significant difference was observed in the students' perceived relevance of the two types of tasks to their argumentation learning. This study provides empirical evidence that integrating argumentative chatbots into classroom debates can lead to improved argumentation skills and higher task motivation among undergraduate students.

Strategic argumentation dialogues for persuasion: Framework and experiments based on modelling the beliefs and concerns of the persuadee

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. Two key dimensions for determining whether an argument is “good” in a particular dialogue are the degree to which the intended audience believes the argument and counterarguments, and the impact that the argument has on the concerns of the intended audience. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling persuadees in terms of their beliefs and concerns, and for harnessing these models in optimizing the choice of move in persuasion dialogues. Our approach is based on the Monte Carlo Tree Search which allows optimization in real-time. We provide empirical results of a study with human participants that compares an automated persuasion system based on this technology with a baseline system that does not take the beliefs and concerns into account in its strategy.

Investigating students’ engagement in chatbot-supported classroom debates

ABSTRACT This study proposed a novel approach to classroom debates, in which chatbots that are able to engage in argumentative dialogues are adopted to facilitate students’ debate preparation. The approach comprised three stages: first, students interacted with a chatbot named Argumate to help them generate ideas; second, students discussed the ideas with their group members; third, students participated in debates with other groups. The study investigated students’ behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement in the approach using multiple data sources, including chat logs, audio recordings of group discussions and classroom debates, and students’ written reflections, collected from four debate groups involving 24 students. The results showed that the students fruitfully generated ideas through interacting with the chatbot in the first stage, but their uptake of chatbot-suggested ideas in the second and third stages was not sufficient. Cognitively, the students adopted various strategies for sharing, synthesizing, and selecting their self-proposed and chatbot-suggested ideas when preparing for debates. Affectively, the students generally reported positive attitudes toward the integration of the chatbot into debate preparation because it suggested inspiring ideas, provided an interesting approach to debate, and created a stress-free learning environment. These findings provide insights into the use of chatbots to enhance classroom debates.

Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences: A pragmatic approach to classroom dialogue and argumentation

Goal. The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). Our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. Method. We describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from five European countries. The corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. We also coded students’ arguments according to Toulmin’s elements and distinguished between low- and high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view. Findings. Our findings show the predominance of the so-called Discovery questions as prompts that are both productive and constructive and Inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. We discuss the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes.

Inclusive Universalism as a Normative Principle of Education

AbstractIn recent years we have seen a newfound engagement with Jürgen Habermas's work in philosophy of education, focusing on his conception of argumentative dialogue, or discourse, as the origin of both truth‐related epistemic judgments and justifications of moral norms that claim rightness rather than truth. In this article, Krassimir Stojanov first reconstructs the way in which Habermas determines the relation between truth and rightness, and he then shows that moral rightness functions as a “truth‐analogue” since moral norms, like true facts, transcend the actual and local practices of their justification. In the case of moral rightness, this transcendence occurs as an infinite process of inclusion of the perspectives and interests of all potentially concerned persons — also (and foremost) the perspectives and interests of those who are strange to each other in their respective values, worldviews, and interests. With this account of “truth‐analogue” moral rightness, Habermas conceptualizes a kind of processual and “difference‐sensible” universalism, which is very different from the substantialist universalism of some traditional conceptions of education, or Bildung. In the final section, Stojanov shows why including children in their otherness as children in the discursive process of production of moral knowledge, and thus treating them with a kind of epistemic respect, is a constitutive condition for that process. The demand for the discursive inclusion of children follows from the discourse ethics approach, but it requires an enlargement and some corrections of that approach.

Argument-based human-AI collaboration for supporting behavior change to improve health.

This article presents an empirical requirement elicitation study for an argumentation-based digital companion for supporting behavior change, whose ultimate goal is the promotion and facilitation of healthy behavior. The study was conducted with non-expert users as well as with health experts and was in part supported by the development of prototypes. It focuses on human-centric aspects, in particular user motivations, as well as on expectations and perceptions regarding the role and interaction behavior of a digital companion. Based on the results of the study, a framework for person tailoring the agent's roles and behaviors, and argumentation schemes are proposed. The results indicate that the extent to which a digital companion argumentatively challenges or supports a user's attitudes and chosen behavior and how assertive and provocative the companion is may have a substantial and individualized effect on user acceptance, as well as on the effects of interacting with the digital companion. More broadly, the results shed some initial light on the perception of users and domain experts of "soft," meta-level aspects of argumentative dialogue, indicating potential for future research.

Competitions and Community of Philosophical Inquiry: Compatible or not?

Philosophy contests proliferate today. The Philosophy Olympiads are the most common. In the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC) community there is some concern about a possible contradiction between the cooperative and community-centred approach to the practice of philosophy in education and the intrinsic rivalry of competitions. The arguments against these contests focus on their main risks. It is thought that they potentially reinforce the particularly harmful meritocratic educational system while simultaneously increasing inequality and reinforcing private education. Furthermore, the belief is that they promote destructive controversy where the goal is winning the debate. In Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI), however, notions exist that could potentially be favoured in these competitions. CoPI focuses on demanding and cooperative argumentative dialogue and encourage parresia, the assertive and reasoned defence of one’s ideas in adversarial contexts. Likewise, the Olympic principles promote fair play; the search for excellence and the ideals of isonomy, isegory and isokratia, fostering participant skills and values which are desirable from an educational, philosophical and democratic perspective.We consider that, from an educational perspective as well as from the Philosophy for Children educational approach, participation in competition is possible and even desirable if the negative aspects it might have are addressed.

An Open-Ended Web Knowledge Retrieval Framework for the Household Domain With Explanation and Learning Through Argumentation

The authors present a knowledge retrieval framework for the household domain enhanced with external knowledge sources that can argue over the information that it returns and learn new knowledge through an argumentation dialogue. The framework provides access to commonsense knowledge about household environments and performs semantic matching between entities from the web knowledge graph ConceptNet, using semantic knowledge from DBpedia and WordNet, with the ones existing in the knowledge graph. They offer a set of predefined SPARQL templates that directly address the ontology on which their knowledge retrieval framework is built and querying through SPARQL. The framework also features an argumentation component, where the user can argue against the answers of the knowledge retrieval component of the framework under two different scenarios: the missing knowledge scenario, where an entity should be in the answers, and the wrong knowledge scenario, where an entity should not be in the answers. This argumentation dialogue can end up in learning a new piece of knowledge when the user wins the dialogue.

Analysis of High School Students’ Argumentative Dialogues in Different Modelling Situations

Analysis of High School Students’ Argumentative Dialogues in Different Modelling Situations

Der diatribische Stil bei Kosmas dem Presbyter und Grigorij Camblak

The diatribe is a mode of exposition that grew out of the teaching of the popular philosophers of the Hellenistic and Roman period. It was adopted by St. Paul in his epistles and by the Church Fathers, first of all by John Chrysostom. In a diatribe, the author presents his thoughts in the form of an argumentative dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor; moreover, this dialogue is not narrated, but acted out, the author speaking both on behalf of himself and his opponent. Some characteristic features of the diatribe are the frequent use of the parenthetical φησί ‘says (the imaginary opponent)’, the formulas τί οὖν ‘what then?’ (to introduce a false conclusion) and μὴ γένοιτο ‘far be it from me’ (to reject it), questions such as asὁρᾷς ‘don’t you see?’ and vocatives such as ἄνθρωπε ‘man’. 
 The diatribe entered medieval Orthodox Slavic writing through the translations of the New Testament and the Church fathers. This paper examines the impact of the diatribe on original texts written by two of the most prominent authors of the Slavic Middle Ages: Kosmas the Presbyter and Grigorij Camblak. 
 Kosmas the Presbyter wrote his Sermon Against the Newly-Appeared Heresy of Bogomil in the second half of the 10th century. This work combines a pedagogical (instruction to the believers) with a polemical layer (refutation of the “heretics”). In a handful of passages, the transition from the first to the second layer exhibits the typical features of diatribe: Kosmas introduces a counterargument by the imaginary opponent by parenthetical рече (φησί) and then addresses this opponent directly in order to refute him. Most of the time, however, the transition from the pedagogical to the polemical layer is less smooth. All in all, Kosmas’s diatribal style does not reach the smoothness of his Chrysostomic models. 
 Grigorij Camblak is the author of a number of homilies that he delivered in the late 14th-early 15th century. Seven of the published homilies attributed to him show a variety of diatribal formulas, which are investigated in more detail. Their function in the polemical discourse is compared to that of the original Hellenistic, Biblical and Patristic diatribal formulas in Greek. Grigorij Camblak’s spontaneous use of these formulas in his original Slavic compositions shows that he internalized the polemical and didactic strategies of the diatribe and found ways to express its functions in Slavic. Some of his homilies indeed approach or even equal the level of Chrysostom’s diatribal style.

A Logical Pragmatics Study of Argument in Islamic-Christian Debates

Lately, pragmatics has attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers. It has been integrated into many fields of study that have contributed to the study of language. A debate is a special form of an argumentative dialogue in which two or more parties take part in attacking and defending certain claims through reasoned discourse. This study has set itself to pragmatically analyze and evaluate selected arguments of religious debates. Islamic-Christian debates are specifically chosen as data for the current study because they have not received due attention in language studies. This study is essentially concerned with investigating the logical pragmatics in the context of Deedat-Swaggart‟s debate. Consequently, the study aims at: identifying the most frequently utilized logical pragmatics strategies; showing whether the pragmatic criteria are frequently kept to or violated. To fulfill the aims, it is hypothesized that debaters utilize certain logical pragmatics strategies (grounds, warrants, claims, backings, qualifiers, and rebuttals, certain types of reasoning, and argumentation schemes), the pragmatic criteria are frequently violated. The study employs a mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) to analyze the data and to verify or reject the hypotheses. The results of the study reveal that the most frequent pragmatic strategies utilized by Deedat are: grounds, deductive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. Swaggart, on the other hand, highly employs: grounds, presumptive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. The results have also shown that Deedat‟s chains of arguments are stronger and more persuasive than Swaggart‟s in terms of satisfying the logical criteria of argument evaluation.

A Pragma-Rhetorical Study of Argument in Islamic-Christian Debates

A debate is a special form of an argumentative dialogue in which two or more parties take part in attacking and defending certain claims through reasoned discourse. This study has set itself to pragmatically analyze and evaluate selected arguments of religious debates. Islamic-Christian debates are specifically chosen as data for the current study because they have not received due attention in language studies. This study is essentially concerned with investigating the pragma-rhetorical strategies utilized in the context of Deedat-Swaggart’s debate. To fulfill the aims, it is hypothesized that debaters utilize certain rhetorical pragmatics strategies: figures of speech (metaphor, allusion, irony, rhetorical question, and hyperbole), argumentation appeals (logos, pathos, ethos), and politeness strategies; and highlighting the rules that have to be fulfilled to produce a successful speech act of persuasion. The study employs a mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) to analyze the data and to verify or reject the hypotheses. The results of the study reveal that the most frequent pragmatic strategies utilized by debate are: rhetorical questions, logos, and off record politeness strategies, whereas Swaggart highly employs: metaphor, ethos, and off record politeness strategies. The results have also shown that Deedat’s arguments are stronger and more persuasive than Swaggart’s in terms of satisfying the rules of the successful speech act of persuasion.

An analytical instrument for coding and assessing argumentative dialogues in science teaching contexts

AbstractMost of the tools developed in the area of Science Education aimed at analyzing either the product or the process of argumentation do not consider the following: (a) arguments are a part of dialogues, (b) dialogues present different objectives, (c) dialogues start from different assumptions, and (d) dialogues shape the roles and moves of interlocutors. This paper intends to address the analysis of argumentative exchanges within educational science dialogues considering several aspects of argumentation that have neglected to be investigated in the field of education, such as the relations among individual moves and the dialogues they are part of, and the influence of such moves on knowledge construction. Toward this purpose, a proposed tool is presented, which describes argumentative dialogues in science teaching contexts across the varied and interrelated dimensions. This tool, consisting of six analytical aspects, is applied to high school chemistry students' argumentative dialogues taking place during modeling activities. Data collection (involving audio and video recording plus observations made by the researchers) revealed the main affordances of this tool as follows: (a) favoring an understanding of the individual and collective students' intentions; (b) enabling the characterization of argumentative discourse beyond the moves of refuting, questioning and providing support; (c) enabling the identification of whether knowledge construction has occurred; and (d) the possibility of analyzing teaching situations across different contexts. Thus, the tool supports the descriptions and analyses of the scientific argumentation process and the associated knowledge construction by students.

Natural language understanding for argumentative dialogue systems in the opinion building domain

This paper introduces a natural language understanding (NLU) framework for argumentative dialogue systems in the information-seeking and opinion building domain. The proposed framework consists of two sub-models, namely intent classifier and argument similarity. Intent classifier model stack BiLSTM with attention mechanism on top of pre-trained BERT model and fine-tune the model for recognizing the user intent, whereas argument similarity model employs BERT+BiLSTM for identifying system arguments the user refers to in his or her natural language utterances. Our model is evaluated in an argumentative dialogue system that engages the user to inform him-/herself about a controversial topic by exploring pro and con arguments and build his/her opinion towards the topic. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we collect user utterances for the interaction with the respective system labelling intent and referenced argument in an extensive online study. The data collection includes multiple topics and two different user types (native English speakers from the UK and non-native English speakers from China). Additionally, we evaluate the proposed intent classifier and argument similarity models separately on the publicly available Banking77 and STS benchmark datasets. The evaluation indicates a clear advantage of the utilized techniques over baseline approaches on several datasets, as well as the robustness of the proposed approach against new topics and different language proficiency as well as the cultural background of the user. Furthermore, results show that our intent classifier model outperforms DIET, DistillBERT, and BERT fine-tuned models in few-shot setups (i.e., with 10, 20, or 30 labelled examples per intent) and full data setup.