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Computer-supported argumentation: A review of the state of the art

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Abstract

Argumentation is an important skill to learn. It is valuable not only in many professional contexts, such as the law, science, politics, and business, but also in everyday life. However, not many people are good arguers. In response to this, researchers and practitioners over the past 15–20 years have developed software tools both to support and teach argumentation. Some of these tools are used in individual fashion, to present students with the “rules” of argumentation in a particular domain and give them an opportunity to practice, while other tools are used in collaborative fashion, to facilitate communication and argumentation between multiple, and perhaps distant, participants. In this paper, we review the extensive literature on argumentation systems, both individual and collaborative, and both supportive and educational, with an eye toward particular aspects of the past work. More specifically, we review the types of argument representations that have been used, the various types of interaction design and ontologies that have been employed, and the system architecture issues that have been addressed. In addition, we discuss intelligent and automated features that have been imbued in past systems, such as automatically analyzing the quality of arguments and providing intelligent feedback to support and/or tutor argumentation. We also discuss a variety of empirical studies that have been done with argumentation systems, including, among other aspects, studies that have evaluated the effect of argument diagrams (e.g., textual versus graphical), different representations, and adaptive feedback on learning argumentation. Finally, we conclude by summarizing the “lessons learned” from this large and impressive body of work, particularly focusing on lessons for the CSCL research community and its ongoing efforts to develop computer-mediated collaborative argumentation systems.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for providing support for this research under the grant “LASAD - Learning to Argue, Support Across Domains.” Also, we want to thank the researchers and developers of the argumentation systems that we reviewed for their feedback in email surveys, and the reviewers for their useful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Campus D3_2, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Oliver Scheuer & Bruce M. McLaren

  2. Department of Informatics, Clausthal University of Technology, Julius-Albert-Str. 4, 38678, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Frank Loll & Niels Pinkwart

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  1. Oliver Scheuer
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Correspondence to Oliver Scheuer.

Appendix: Overview of reviewed tools

Appendix: Overview of reviewed tools

Our review covered the systems, methods, and studies shown in the table below. In the rightmost column, in brackets, we provide the number of citations to the main paper of each system, based on a Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) as an indicator of the influence of each system. This Google search was done in October and November 2009. All URLs were last visited on 2009-10-27.

No

Tool

Feature description

Reference [#]

1

AcademicTalk

collaborative, educational, sentence openers, based on dialogue game theory

McAlister et al. 2004 [56] http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/ltri/research/projects/at.htm

2

Aquanet

collaborative, configurable ontology

Marshall et al. 1991 [216]

3

Araucaria

transcript, argument schemes, central database for argument exchange

Reed and Rowe 2004 [96] http://Araucaria.computing.dundee.ac.uk

4

Argue/ArguMed

argument assistance, legal domain

Verheij 2003 [66] http://www.ai.rug.nl/∼verheij/aaa/argumed3.htm

5

ArguNet

collaborative, Web-based

Schneider et al. 2007 [-] http://www.argunet.org

6

ARGUNAUT

educational, support system for human moderators, used with Digalo

De Groot et al. 2007 [12], McLaren et al. in press [-] http://www.argunaut.org

7

Athena

educational, report generator

Rolf and Magnusson 2002 [30] http://www.athenasoft.org

8

AVER

criminal investigations

van den Braak and Vreeswijk 2006 [5]

9

AVERs

criminal investigations

Bex et al. 2007 [13]

10

Belvedere v1 and v2

educational, collaborative, ITS, scientific/evidential reasoning

Suthers et al. 1995 [163], Suthers et al. 2001 [43]

11

Belvedere v3 and v4

educational, collaborative, multiple views, scientific /evidential reasoning

Suthers 2003 [39] http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu/lilt/software/belvedere

12

BetterBlether

educational, collaborative, sentence openers

Robertson et al. 1998 [67]

13

Carneades

support of multiple proof-standards, IBIS

Gordon et al. 2007 [58] http://carneades.berlios.de

14

CoChemEx

educational, collaborative, inquiry learning, chemistry, scripted

Tsovaltzi et al. 2010 [-]

15

CoFFEE

educational, collaborative, multiple tools, configurable

Belgiorno et al. 2008 [1] http://www.coffee-soft.org/

16

Collaboratorium

collaborative, IBIS

Klein and Iandoli 2008 [1], Malone and Klein 2007 [6] http://cci.mit.edu/research/climate.html

17

Collect-UML

Educational, collaborative, problem solving, UML diagrams, ITS

Baghaei et al. 2007 [6]

18

Compendium

successor of Questmap, collaborative, IBIS

Buckingham Shum et al. 2006 [54], Okada and Buckingham Shum 2008 [1] http://compendium.open.ac.uk

19

Convince Me

educational, model of coherent reasoning

Ranney and Schank 1998 [26] http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/∼schank/convinceme

20

CoPe_it!

successor of Hermes, (also) educational, collaborative, multiple views, support of multiple proof-standards, decision support, IBIS

Karacapilidis 2009 [-]

21

CycleTalk Chat Environment

educational, collaborative, problem solving, thermodynamics, tutorial dialogues

Kumar et al. 2007 [22]

22

DebateGraph

collaborative, local views

http://www.debategraph.org

23

Debatepedia

collaborative, wiki-based

http://wiki.idebate.org

24

Digalo

educational, collaborative, configurable ontology

Schwarz and Glassner 2007 [4] http://www.dunes.gr

25

DREW

educational, collaborative, multiple tools

Corbel et al. 2002 [18]

26

Epsilon (with tutorial agent Pierce)

educational, collaborative, problem solving, OMT diagrams, sentence openers, interaction analysis, tutorial feedback, group and student model

Goodman et al. 2005 [28]

27

Epsilon (interaction analysis)

educational, collaborative, problem solving, OMT diagrams, sentence openers, interaction analysis

Soller 2001 [214]; Soller 2004 [38]

28

Group Leader Tutor

educational, collaborative, sentence openers, Group Leader agent to facilitate interaction

McManus and Aiken 1995 [100]; Israel and Aiken 2007 [3]

29

Hermes

collaborative, support of multiple proof-standards, decision support, IBIS

Karacapilidis and Papadias 2001 [128] http://www-sop.inria.fr/aid/hermes

30

IBIS/gIBIS

collaborative, notational support to solve wicked problems

Conklin and Begeman 1988 [1310]

31

iLogos

educational, causal diagrams

Easterday et al. 2007 [4] http://www.phil.cmu.edu/projects/argument_mapping

32

Interloc

successor of AcademicTalk, educational, collaborative, sentence openers, configurable dialogue games

Ravenscroft et al. 2008 [1] http://www.interloc.org

33

KIE/SenseMaker, WISE

educational; container visualization, inquiry learning, science learning

Bell 1997 [142]; Bell and Linn 2000 [222], Linn et al. 2003 [89] http://tels.sourceforge.net/sensemaker

34

LARGO

educational; legal argumentation, ITS

Pinkwart et al. 2006a [23]

35

LASAD

educational, collaborative, flexible/configurable architecture, intelligent support

Loll et al. 2009 [-] http://cscwlab.in.tu-clausthal.de/lasad/

36

Legalese

legal argumentation

Hair 1991 [10]

37

Pedabot

educational, support for technical discussion boards by IR

Kim et al. 2008 [4]

38

Questmap

collaborative, IBIS

Carr 2003 [32]

39

Rashi/Human Biology Inquiry Tutor

educational, ITS, inquiry learning, multiple tools

Woolf et al. 2005 [4]

40

Rationale

educational, multiple argument modes

Van Gelder 2007 [8] http://rationale.austhink.com

41

Reason!Able

educational

Van Gelder 2002 [22], Van Gelder 2003 [35]

42

Room 5

collaborative, legal argumentation, implements dialogue game

Loui et al. 1997 [54]

43

SEAS

decision support, argument templates; table, starburst and constellation depictions of multidimensional arguments

Lowrance 2007 [4], Lowrance et al. 2008 [4] http://www.ai.sri.com/∼seas

44

TC3

educational, collaborative, tool suite to support collaborative writing of argumentative texts

Munneke et al. 2003 [14]

45

Zeno

Predecessor of Carneades and Hermes, support of multiple proof-standards, decision support, IBIS

Gordon and Karacapilidis 1997 [213]

46

–

educational, collaborative

Jeong 2003 [115]

47

–

educational, collaborative, argumentation vee diagrams

Nussbaum et al. 2007 [2]

48

–

educational, collaborative, scripting by roles approach

Schellens et al. 2007 [3]

49

–

educational, collaborative, micro-scripting, Toulmin-based

Stegmann et al. 2007 [16]

50

–

educational, collaborative, integration of conceptual and discourse representations, uses Belvedere

Suthers et al. 2008 [37]

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Scheuer, O., Loll, F., Pinkwart, N. et al. Computer-supported argumentation: A review of the state of the art. Computer Supported Learning 5, 43–102 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-009-9080-x

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