The Magtalo prototype environment harnesses dialogue protocols to support flexible, intuitive interaction with data in complex, contentious domains and provides mechanisms for eliciting structured knowledge. Magtalo represents the first example of an implemented online system that uses a closely specified argument-based dialogue protocol combined with a rich language for representing monologic argument to provide a tool for intuitive user exploration of a disagreement space. This approach also enables the expansion of argument resources through knowledge elicitation, which is structured by the argument dialogue protocol. The continuing aim of our research is to use advances in argumentation theory to push the practice of argumentation technology in providing tools and interfaces that have wide appeal.

This paper reports the design and comparison of three visualizations to represent the structure and content within arguments. Arguments are artifacts of reasoning widely used across domains such as education, policy making, and science. An argument is made up of sequences of statements (premises) which can support or contradict each other, individually or in groups through Boolean operators. Understanding the resulting hierarchical structure of arguments while being able to read the arguments' text poses problems related to overview, detail, and navigation. Based on interviews with argument analysts we iteratively designed three techniques, each using combinations of tree visualizations (sunburst, icicle), content display (in-situ, tooltip) and interactive navigation. Structured discussions with the analysts show benefits of each these techniques; for example, sunburst being good in presenting overview but showing arguments in-situ is better than pop-ups. A controlleduser study with 21 participants and three tasks shows complementary evidence suggesting that a sunburst with pop-up for the content is the best trade-off solution. Our results can inform visualizations within existing argument visualization tools and increase the visibility of ‘novel-and-effective’ visualizations in the argument visualization community.

This paper reports preliminary work into the exploitation of argumentation schemes within dialogue games. We identify a property of dialogue games that we call “scheme awareness” that captures the relationship between dialogue game systems and argumentation schemes. Scheme awareness is used to examine the ways in which existing dialogue games utilise argumentation schemes and consequently the degree with which a dialogue game can be used to construct argument structures. The aim is to develop a set of guidelines for dialogue game design, which feed into a set of Dialogue Game Description Language (DGDL) extensions in turn enabling dialogue games to better exploit argumentation schemes