One task common to all notice-and-comment rulemaking is identifying substantive claims and arguments made in the comments by stakeholders and other members of the public. Extracting and summarizing this material may be helpful to internal decisionmaking; to produce the legally required public explanation of the final rule, it is essential. When comments are lengthy or numerous, natural language...

The intuitive idea that those things that we put things into categories because we find them similar appears to be non-controversial, if not circular. Cars are clearly more similar to other cars than they are to trees, and trees more similar to other trees than they are to cars. However, a number of theorists have recently questioned the degree to which the notion of similarity is sufficiently ...

Image classification is a critical task for both humans and computers. One of the challenges lies in the large scale of the semantic space. In particular, humans can recognize tens of thousands of object classes and scenes. No computer vision algorithm today has been tested at this scale. This paper presents a study of large scale categorization including a series of challenging experiments on ...

In the past few years there have been a number of proposals for mechanisms for negotiation between agents that make use of argumentation. These proposals have largely been vague on the subject of how the generation and interpretation of arguments fits into the process of negotiation. This paper addresses this gap, proposing a particular protocol which is suitable for negotiation, and illustrati...

This paper introduces a new class called hang yourself (HY) arguments into the theory of defeasible argumentation. The novelty of such arguments is that they are inherently destructive: they cannot be used to support conclusions but only to attack other arguments. In this paper it is described what these arguments are, how they can be formalized, and what the formal consequences are of adding t...

This paper outlines an integrated approach to trust and relevance with respect to arguments: in particular, it is suggested that trust in relevance has a central role in argumentation. We first distinguish two types of argumentative relevance: internal relevance, i.e. the extent to which a premise has a bearing on its purported conclusion, and external relevance, i.e. a measure of how much a wh...

Research stemming from self-categorization theory (Turner et al., 1987) has demonstrated that individuals are typically more persuaded by messages from their in-group than by messages from the out-group. The present research investigated the role of issue relevance in moderating these effects. In particular, it was predicted that in-groups would only be more persuasive when the dimension on whi...

The purpose of this introduction is to give a rough overview the discussion formalization arguments, focusing on deductive arguments. structured around four important junctions: i) notion support, which captures relation between conclusion and premises an argument, ii) choice formal language into argument translated in order make it amenable evaluation via methods, iii) question quality criteri...