Burden of Proof in Deliberation Dialogs

The literature in argumentation and artificial intelligence has distinguished five types of burden of proof in persuasion dialogs, but there appears to have been no serious investigation so far on how burdens of proof should be modeled in deliberation dialogs. The work in this paper is directed toward filling that gap by extending existing formal models of deliberation dialog to analyze four examples of deliberation dialog where burden of proof is at issue or poses an interesting problem. The examples are used to show (1) that the eight stages in the formal model of Hitchcock, McBurney and Parsons (2007) need to be divided into three more general stages, an opening stage, an argumentation stage and a closing stage, (2) that deliberation dialog shifts to persuasion dialog during the argumentation stage, and (3) that burden of proof is only operative during the argumentation stage. What is shown in general is that deliberation is, in the typical type of case, a mixed dialog in which the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ARGMAS
• Authors: Douglas Walton
• Keywords: ARGMAS 2009, Artificial Intelligence, Deliberation Dialog, Dialog, Persuasion Dialog