The generalised, automated reconstruction of the reasoning structures underlying persuasive communication is an enormously challenging task. While this work in argument mining is increasingly informed by the rich tradition of argumentation studies outside the computational field, the rhetorical perspective on argumentation is thus far largely ignored. To explore the application of rhetorical in...

We present three distinct concepts of what constitutes a scientific understanding of a dynamical system. The development of each of these paradigms has resulted in a significant expansion in the kind of system that can be investigated. In particular, the recently-developed ‘algorithmic modelling paradigm’ has allowed us to enlarge the domain of discourse to include complex real-world processes ...

The last decades have seen a rise in the public use of notions from the forgiveness discourse. In the present paper it is examined what role forgiveness, reconciliation and empowerment can play in the practice of transitional justice. On the basis of empirical findings, it is shown that forgiveness is too high an ideal to aim at. The promotion of forgiveness can generate much resistance, and ev...

This paper is concerned with the robust analysis of the discourse structure of a text via underspecification. Most current discourse theories (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann and Thompson (1988), Abduction by Hobbs et al. (1993) or Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) by Asher (1993)) require detailed world and context knowledge for the derivation of the discourse str...

We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from a discourse tagged corpus to resolve ambiguities. We propose the idea of tagging discourse segment boundaries to represent the structural information of discourse. Using this representati...

By a domain we mean a universe of discourse. Typical examples are (partially) man-made universes of discourse such as Air Traffic, Airports, Financial Services (banks, insurance companies, securities trading [brokers, traders, stock exchanges]), Health Care (hospitals etc.), Secure IT Systems (according to Intl. ISO/IEC Standard 17799), The Market (consumers, retailers, wholesalers, producers, ...

In a decision making context, multiple choices of actions are usually ooered to solve a particular problem. Consequently, the question of preferences among the actions will occur. The ordering of recommended actions by preference is made by taking into account the states of the universe of discourse. We develop here a logic L p for reasoning about preferences in such circumstances. The language...