Evaluative arguments are pervasive in natural human communication. In countless situations people attempt to advise or persuade their interlocutors that something is desirable (vs. undesirable) or right (vs. wrong). With the proliferation of on-line systems serving as personal advisors and assistants, there is a pressing need to develop general and testable computational models for generating and presenting evaluative arguments. Previous research on generating evaluative arguments has been characterized by two major limitations. First, researchers have tended to focus only on specific aspects of the generation process. Second, the proposed approaches were not empirically tested. The research presented in this paper addresses both limitations. We have designed and implemented a complete computational model for generating evaluative arguments. For content selection and organization, we devised an argumentation strategy based on guidelines from argumentation theory. For expressing the co...
Giuseppe Carenini, Johanna D. Moore