Political Engagement Through Tools for Argumentation

In this paper we discuss the development of tools to support a system for edemocracy that is based upon and makes use of existing theories of argument representation and evaluation. The system is designed to gather public opinions on political issues from which conclusions can be drawn concerning how government policies are presented, justified and viewed by the users of the system. We describe how the original prototype has been augmented by the addition of well motivated tools to enable it to handle multiple debates and to provide analyses of the opinions submitted, from which it is possible to pinpoint specific grounds for disagreement on an issue. The tool set now supports both argumentation schemes and argumentation frameworks to provide representation and evaluation facilities. We contrast our system with existing fielded approaches designed to facilitate public consultation on political issues and show the particular benefits that our approach can bring in attempting to improve...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: COMMA
• Authors: Dan Cartwright, Katie Atkinson
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Argument Representation, COMMA 2008, Political Issues, Tools