Paper ID: 2408.08648

Understanding Enthymemes in Argument Maps: Bridging Argument Mining and Logic-based Argumentation

Jonathan Ben-Naim, Victor David, Anthony Hunter

Argument mining is natural language processing technology aimed at identifying arguments in text. Furthermore, the approach is being developed to identify the premises and claims of those arguments, and to identify the relationships between arguments including support and attack relationships. In this paper, we assume that an argument map contains the premises and claims of arguments, and support and attack relationships between them, that have been identified by argument mining. So from a piece of text, we assume an argument map is obtained automatically by natural language processing. However, to understand and to automatically analyse that argument map, it would be desirable to instantiate that argument map with logical arguments. Once we have the logical representation of the arguments in an argument map, we can use automated reasoning to analyze the argumentation (e.g. check consistency of premises, check validity of claims, and check the labelling on each arc corresponds with thw logical arguments). We address this need by using classical logic for representing the explicit information in the text, and using default logic for representing the implicit information in the text. In order to investigate our proposal, we consider some specific options for instantiation.

Submitted: Aug 16, 2024