Argumentation Semantics Research Articles

Unholy Alliances and their Threat: The Convergence of Terrorism, Organized Crime and Corruption

AbstractSince the tragedy of September 11, 2001 (9/11) there have been a growing awareness and recognition of the expanding threat presented by the transmutation and convergence of international organized crime and terrorist groups. There is a semantic debate on whether these organizations are “converging” or “transforming.” Regardless, this worrisome development is complicated and progressively difficult to combat and calls for law enforcement, intelligence and military interventions. While the United States and other countries have been dealing with the post-9/11 world of persistent problems like Iraq, Afghanistan, al Qaeda, “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS), Syria, and more, the links between organized crime and terrorism could prolong these challenges and generate further disruptions and menace to global security and development. There are strong operational needs and requirements that bring organized crime and terrorists together for collaboration and even seamless transitions within the same general operation. However, there are substantial hurdles that make a total teamwork between the two groups not so easily achievable. For example, organized crime normally avoids the publicity and the indiscriminate killings often used by terrorists. However, it is clear that the merging of international organized crime and terrorist groups is growing and presents unique challenges and opportunities. This paper examines this ongoing transmutation, convergence and cooperation between transnational organized crime and terrorism, and offers examples and recommendations on how to prevent it and defeat it.

Forgetting an Argument

The notion of forgetting, as considered in the famous paper by Lin and Reiter in 1994 has been extensively studied in classical logic and more recently, in non-monotonic formalisms like logic programming. In this paper, we convey the idea of forgetting to another major AI formalism, namely Dung-style argumentation frameworks. Our approach is axiomatic-driven and not limited to any specific semantics: we propose semantical and syntactical desiderata encoding different criteria for what forgetting an argument might mean; analyze how these criteria relate to each other; and check whether the criteria can be satisfied in general. The analysis is done for a number of widely used argumentation semantics. Our investigation shows that almost all desiderata are individually satisfiable. However, combinations of semantical and/or syntactical conditions reveal a much more interesting landscape. For instance, we found that the ad hoc approach to forgetting an argument, i.e., by the syntactical removal of the argument and all of its associated attacks, is too restrictive and only compatible with the two weakest semantical desiderata. Amongst the several interesting combinations identified, we showed that one satisfies a notion of minimal change and presented an algorithm that given an AF F and argument x, constructs a suitable AF G satisfying the conditions in the combination.

Clauses of reason with argumentative semantics in Bulgarian

Clauses of reason with argumentative semantics in Bulgarian

Argumentacja semantyczna – podstawowe pojęcia i problemy definicyjne

Celem artykułu jest zdefiniowanie pewnego typu argumentacji, rzadko opisywanego do tej pory zarówno w polskiej, jak i zagranicznej literaturze z zakresu teorii argumentacji, a przez to usystematyzowanie problematyki badań nad zabiegami semantycznymi w argumentacji. Analiza, jak modyfikacja znaczenia może wpływać na moc argumentacji skłania do wyróżnienia nowego typu argumentacji – argumentacji semantycznej. Przeanalizowane zostaną też pojęcia definicji perswazyjnej i klasyfikacji oraz sposoby ich aplikacji w formułowaniu argumentu. Zaproponowana tutaj definicja argumentacji semantycznej może rodzić pewne problemy, typowe przy wprowadzaniu nowego pojęcia, dlatego druga część pracy jest poświęcona kwestiom związanym z zaproponowanym kształtem definicji. Podanie definicji jest niezbędne do dalszych badań nad argumentacją semantyczną, jej typologią i oceną poprawności.

A Criticism against the Semantic Argument for Mental Content Externalism

A Criticism against the Semantic Argument for Mental Content Externalism

심성 내용 외재론의 의미론적 논증 비판

심성 내용 외재론의 의미론적 논증 비판

Cognitive Semantic Study of the Preposition ‘Min’ in the Quran

The preposition ‘min’ is semantically more complex than what the traditional lexicaAl-syntactic approaches held it to be adverb or adverbial of place and time. This paper attempts to investigate the semantic complexity of the preposition ‘min’ from cognitive linguistic perspective to find out its semantic classification and linguistic symmetric patterns. Data has been taken from the Quran to investigate the claim of conceptual metaphor theory that sensorimotor neural structures generates the preposition ‘min’ on the image schema of source-path-goal. The findings reveal that the source-pathgoal image schema is not only at work in the use of preposition ‘min’ in spatio-geometric sense, but also to map the abstract concepts, emotional states and relationship with supernatural entities in spatial terms in the Quran. However, the data also show idiosyncratic behaviour of preposition, attaining different semantic arguments in different linguistic contexts, which strengthen the argument that language use cannot be abridged to static mapping in the human conceptual system. This paper recommends future research on the same preposition or other prepositions to investigate further the source-path-goal image schema in the Quran and Arabic language.

An Ontological and Semantic Foundation for Safety and Security Science

When discussing the concepts of risk, safety, and security, people have an intuitive understanding of what these concepts mean, and, to a certain level, this understanding is universal. However, when delving into the real meaning of these concepts, one is likely to fall into semantic debates and ontological discussions. In industrial parks, it is important that (risk) managers from different companies, belonging to one and the same park, have the same understanding of the concepts of risk, safety, and security. It is even important that all companies in all industrial parks share a common understanding regarding these issues. As such, this paper explores the similarities and differences behind the perceptions of these concepts, to come to a fundamental understanding of risk, safety, and security, proposing a semantic and ontological ground for safety and security science, based on an etymological and etiological study of the concepts of risk and safety. The foundation has been induced by the semantics used in the ISO 31000 risk management guidance standard. Hence, this article proposes a coherent, standardized set of concepts and definitions with a focus on the notion “objectives” that can be used as an ontological foundation for safety and security science, linking “objectives” with the concepts of safety, security, risk, performance and also failure and success, theoretically allowing for an increasingly more precise understanding and measurement of (un)safety across the whole range of individuals, sectors and organizations, or even society as a whole.

Synthesizing Argumentation Frameworks from Examples


 
 
 Argumentation is today a topical area of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Abstract argumentation, with argumentation frameworks (AFs) as the underlying knowledge representation formalism, is a central viewpoint to argumentation in AI. Indeed, from the perspective of AI and computer science, understanding computational and representational aspects of AFs is key in the study of argumentation.
 Realizability of AFs has been recently proposed as a central notion for analyzing the expressive power of AFs under different semantics. In this work, we propose and study the AF synthesis problem as a natural extension of realizability, addressing some of the shortcomings arising from the relatively stringent definition of realizability. In particular, realizability gives means of establishing exact conditions on when a given collection of subsets of arguments has an AF with exactly the given collection as its set of extensions under a specific argumentation semantics. However, in various settings within the study of dynamics of argumentation---including revision and aggregation of AFs---non-realizability can naturally occur. To accommodate such settings, our notion of AF synthesis seeks to construct, or synthesize, AFs that are semantically closest to the knowledge at hand even when no AFs exactly representing the knowledge exist. Going beyond defining the AF synthesis problem, we study both theoretical and practical aspects of the problem. In particular, we (i) prove NP-completeness of AF synthesis under several semantics, (ii) study basic properties of the problem in relation to realizability, (iii) develop algorithmic solutions to NP-hard AF synthesis using the constraint optimization paradigms of maximum satisfiability and answer set programming, (iv) empirically evaluate our algorithms on different forms of AF synthesis instances, as well as (v) discuss variants and generalizations of AF synthesis.
 
 

Deep Semantic Role Labeling for Tweets using 5W1H: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How

In natural language understanding, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is considered as one of the important tasks and widely studied by the research community. State-of-the-art lexical resources have been in existence for defining the semantic role arguments with respect to the predicates. However, such lexical resources are complex in nature which is difficult to understand. Therefore, instead of the classical semantic role arguments, we adopted the concept of 5W1H (Who, What, When, Where, Why and How) for SRL. The 5W1H concept is widely used in journalism and it is much simpler and easier to understand as compared to the classical SRL lexical resources. In the recent years, recurrent neural networks (RNN) based end-to-end SRL systems have gained significant attention. However, all recent works have been developed for formal texts. This paper reports on the implementation of a deep neural network using the attention mechanism for extracting the 5W1H from tweets. Our implementation reports an F-1score of 88.21 which outperforms other recent Twitter SRL system by 28.72.

On Construction and Evaluation of Analogical Arguments for Persuasive Reasoning

ABSTRACTAnalogical reasoning is a complex process based on a comparison between two pairs of concepts or states of affairs (aka. the source and the target) for characterizing certain features from one to another. Arguments which employ this process to support their claims are called analogical arguments. Our goals are to study the structure and the computation for their defeasibility in light of the argumentation theory. Our proposed assumption-based argumentation with predicate similarity ABA(p) framework can be seen as an extension of assumption-based argumentation framework (ABA), in which not only assumptions can be used but also similarity of predicates is used to support a claim. ABA (p) labels each argument tree with an analogical degree and different ways to aggregate numerical values are studied toward gullible/skeptical characteristics in agent reasoning. The acceptability of analogical arguments is evaluated w.r.t. the semantics of abstract argumentation. Finally, we demonstrate that ABA (p) captures the argumentation scheme for argument from analogy and provides an explanation when it is used for persuasion.

Digital Service Taxes and the Broader Shift From Determining the Source of Income to Taxing Location-Specific Rents

In recent decades, a number of fantastically successful, mainly American, multinational entities (MNEs) – led and epitomized by the “Four Horsemen,” Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google – have risen to global economic hyper-prominence. While their market capitalizations and profits are high, reflecting that they earn substantial rents or quasi-rents, their aggregate global taxes are generally quite low, reflecting their ability to create stateless income. Often, these MNEs are technology companies, like the Four Horsemen – but not always. Starbucks, for example, enjoys high global profits and low taxes despite its following a classic brick-and-mortar retail business model. This reflects that, like its more obviously high-tech peers, it relies on valuable intellectual property that helps it in creating both global pretax profitability and stateless income. Such MNEs’ rise has placed substantial pressure on existing corporate income tax models. While the existing models might perhaps be significantly improved, this would still leave market countries (where the MNEs’ consumers are located) well short of being able to tax, as fully as they might like, the location-specific rents that these companies earn by interacting with their residents. Market countries that use novel tax instruments, such as properly designed digital services taxes (DSTs) to expand their capacity to reach such location-specific rents, are not acting unreasonably, as judged within existing (and fairly lax) norms for constraining and channeling countries’ self-interested behavior. DSTs also have the potential (although whether it will be realized is uncertain) to improve, rather than worsen, global efficiency and distribution. Whether they prove permanent or merely transitional, DSTs look like harbingers of a new era in which entity-level corporate taxation rightly focuses more on locational rents, and less on decades-old doctrinal and semantic debates concerning the supposedly “true” source of economic income and value creation.

An input information enhanced model for relation extraction

We present a novel end-to-end model to jointly extract semantic relations and argument entities from sentence texts. This model does not require any handcrafted feature set or auxiliary toolkit, and hence it could be easily extended to a wide range of sequence tagging tasks. A new method of using the word morphology feature for relation extraction is studied in this paper. We combine the word morphology feature and the semantic feature to enrich the representing capacity of input vectors. Then, an input information enhanced unit is developed for the bidirectional long short-term memory network (Bi-LSTM) to overcome the information loss caused by the gate operations and the concatenation operations in the LSTM memory unit. A new tagging scheme using uncertain labels and a corresponding objective function are exploited to reduce the interference information from non-entity words. Experiments are performed on three datasets: The New York Times (NYT) and ACE2005 datasets for relation extraction and the SemEval 2010 task 8 dataset for relation classification. The results demonstrate that our model achieves a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art model for relation extraction on the NYT dataset and achieves a competitive performance on the ACE2005 dataset.

Discurso relatado à luz da Semântica Argumentativa e da Gramática Normativa

O caráter normativo e prescritivo da Gramática, dita tradicional, estabelece um padrão específico em relação ao uso de determinadas construções linguísticas, considerando apenas o aspecto estrutural da língua. Sob esse viés, a Gramática Normativa (GN) prescreve alguns fatores correspondentes ao uso e identificação das formas de discurso relatado, em suas variações. A Semântica Argumentativa (SA), por sua vez, propõe a descrição e análise dos sentidos dos enunciados, consequentemente do discurso, a partir da observação das vozes que o locutor coloca em cena na sua enunciação. Diante disso, interessou-nos observar como a GN e os estudos da Polifonia, no âmbito da SA, abordam e compreendem o discurso relatado. Dessa forma, elaboramos um estudo sobre o discurso em estilo direto e estilo indireto – especificamente – pontuando a abordagem apresentada pela SA em paralelo com a abordagem da GN da Língua Portuguesa. Para tanto, utilizamos recortes de ocorrências de enunciados na forma de discurso relatado coletados no gênero acadêmico Projetos de Pesquisa de TCC, de dois cursos distintos de graduação (corpus coletado para pesquisa do nosso mestrado). Como metodologia, adotamos a análise do tipo descritiva-interpretativista, sob as concepções teóricas de Ducrot (1987; 1988); Nascimento (2009; 2015), na perspectiva da Semântica Argumentativa e Cunha (1979); Bechara (2006), na abordagem da Gramática Normativa. Observou-se que a SA apresenta uma possibilidade de análise mais voltada para o funcionamento do discurso relatado, em enunciados reais, enquanto a GN apresenta limitações de análise, dado o caráter eminentemente sintático com que trata o fenômeno pesquisado.

Proximity semantics for topic-based abstract argumentation

As we engage in a debate with other parties, it is usual that several issues might come under discussion. Many of these issues are interrelated by the topic they address, while others represent a departure from the focus of the discussion. In this work, we propose to extend Dung’s abstract argumentation frameworks by decorating arguments with a set of interrelated topics. These topics represent what the arguments are addressing and provide a supporting structure for the analysis of multi-topic argumentation. The introduction of a notion of distance between two topics associated with the arguments permits to consider the proximity of an argument to the focus of the debate, supporting in that manner an enriched semantic analysis.

CUT ELIMINATION IN HYPERSEQUENT CALCULUS FOR SOME LOGICS OF LINEAR TIME

AbstractThis is a sequel article to [10] where a hypersequent calculus (HC) for some temporal logics of linear frames includingKt4.3and its extensions for dense and serial flow of time was investigated in detail. A distinctive feature of this approach is that hypersequents are noncommutative, i.e., they are finite lists of sequents in contrast to other hypersequent approaches using sets or multisets. Such a system in [10] was proved to be cut-free HC formalization of respective logics by means of semantical argument. In this article we present an equivalent variant of this calculus for which a constructive syntactical proof of cut elimination is provided.

Wpływ perykopy Mk 16,9-20 na znaczenie rzeczownika ἀρχή w Mk 1,1

This study is devoted to the issue of the influence of the pericope Mk 16,9-20 on the semantic meaning of the noun ἀρχή in Mk 1,1. The starting thesis is: after the joining of the so-called canoni- cal ending Mk 16,9-20 to the Gospel of Mark, the first word of this work ἀρχὴ, lost the meaning of the beginning and assumed the value of the summary in the sense of a collection of basic kerygma- tic information about the Event of Jesus Christ. In order to demonstrate the validity of the put forward hypothesis, the current study has been divided into two parts. The first part discusses the issue of the phenomenon of combining biblical texts and its influence on the semantic meaning of particular words or pericope. The second part, however, gives arguments for the proposed solution. The semantic argument shows that the word ἀρχή may have the meaning of summary. The translational argument cites some examples of bi- blical translations of the word ἀρχή as a certain summary. The scriptural argument shows that canonical gospels are a literary summary of the words and works of Jesus Christ. And the exegetical argument justifies the summary character of the entire first verse Mk 1,1. In the light of the quoted evidence, the following conclusion is to be drawn: the addition of the pericope Mk 16,9-20 to the Gospel of Mark made the latter a closed literary composition, and this in turn also influenced the meaning of the word ἀρχή in Mk 1,1, which lost the sense of the beginningand took the character of a summary.

Reasoning over Assumption-Based Argumentation Frameworks via Direct Answer Set Programming Encodings

Focusing on assumption-based argumentation (ABA) as a central structured formalism to AI argumentation, we propose a new approach to reasoning in ABA with and without preferences. While previous approaches apply either specialized algorithms or translate ABA reasoning to reasoning over abstract argumentation frameworks, we develop a direct approach by encoding ABA reasoning tasks in answer set programming. This significantly improves on the empirical performance of current ABA reasoning systems. We also give new complexity results for reasoning in ABA+, suggesting that the integration of preferential information into ABA results in increased problem complexity for several central argumentation semantics.

An Incremental Algorithm for Computing the Grounded Extension of Dynamic Abstract Argumentation Frameworks

Several formalisms have been introduced to model disputes between agents. Abstract argumentation is a simple, yet powerful formalism for modeling disputes by abstracting from the internal structure of arguments. Much work has been done to characterize fast algorithms for ‘static’ argumentation frameworks which are assumed to be fixed, in the sense that they do not change during a dispute. However, argumentation frameworks are highly dynamic in practice. For instance, applications of argumentation for negotiation and persuasion are usually based on protocols where agents state their arguments and attacks one after the other in a dynamic process during which the outcome of the debate evolves. We focus on one of the most popular argumentation semantics, namely the grounded semantics, and deal with the problem of recalculating the extensions of argumentation frameworks after adding or deleting attacks or arguments. In particular, we propose an incremental algorithm for the efficient computation of the grounded semantics, useful in dynamic contexts where argumentation frameworks are continuously updated to consider new information. We report on experiments showing that our incremental algorithm is on average faster than CoQuiAAS, the solver that won the last edition of the international competition on computational models of argumentation for the task of computing the grounded extension of an argumentation framework.

A Semantic Analysis of Personal Names in Datooga Society

AbstractNaming can sometimes be associated with particular situations or someone’s birth. This study intends to find out the association between Datooga names and socio-cultural backgrounds. The study employs a qualitative research approach, in which case the collected data was subjected to descriptive analysis. Data have been collected from Datooga speaking students studying at the Dar es Salaam University College of Education, through Interviews and Questionnaire. The analysis is based on the Kripke’s three arguments in naming as described by Speaks (2007). The theory explains how naming is achieved with reference to the modal argument, the semantic argument and the epistemic argument. The findings of the study have revealed that in the Datooga society, naming is associated with different phenomena particularly time of birth and prevailing situations, traditions, norms and customs.