me
Computational Logic and Argumentation
Department of Computing
Imperial College London
 

Home

Group Members

Projects

Publications

Resources

Other Information

THIS WEB SITE IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. PLEASE VISIT OUR NEW WEB SITE HERE.

Argumentation is a powerful technique aiming at the evaluation of possible conclusions/claims by considering reasons for and against them. These reasons (arguments and counter-arguments) provide support for and against the conclusions/claims, through a mixture of dialectical and logical reasoning.

Although originally proposed within the realms of logic, philosophy, and law, in the last decade argumentation has attracted wide interest in computing to understand and meet the challenges of a number of applications characterised by the lack of certain, consistent and complete information, and when numerical (e.g. statistical) information is not available or is only partially available.

The group is developing models, systems and applications of several incarnations of computational argumentation, some abstracts, other grounded in computational logic, and studying relationships between these models and systems with other logic-based paradigms from knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence, including (abductive) logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. The group is also exploring the automated extraction of argumentation frameworks from text, using natural language processing and machine learning. Research in the group has strong theoretical underpinnings, but is driven by applications in several areas including:

  • decision support in medicine: see the ROAD2H EPSRC project and, within the earlier TRaDAr EPSRC project, papers at KR2012, CIMA2014 and AAMAS2014
  • debates: see papers at PRIMA2017, KR2016, EUMAS2015, COMMA2014, Journal of Decision Systems 2014
  • deception detection: see paper at PrAISe2016
  • engineering design: see the Arg&Dec system and paper at TAFA2015, Arg&Dec2015 paper, and work within the DesMOLD EU project, e.g. as described in this ICTAI2014 paper
  • decision-making for smart electricity (TRaDAr EPSRC project)

  • For information, contact Francesca Toni