Towards a Better Understanding of Critiques about Ancient Texts using Argumentation

Ancient texts are interpreted by critics in order to assign them a given semantics. However, the semantics to be associated to these texts is not unique and different critics may have different conflicting opinions about their “correct” interpretation. In this paper, we propose to adopt argumentation theory, a technique to manage conflicting information, together with Semantic Web languages and techniques to provide an overall view of such conflicting critiques, detect what are the different competing viewpoints and what are the strongest arguments emerging from the debate. An ontology for argumentative documents is used to annotate ancient texts, and an example of such annotation is provided about the topic of the Eternity of the species in Aristotle.