Page 205 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

Accessing Validity of Argumentation of Agents of the Internet of Everything 191

argumentation for their claims; we will observe how formed rhetoric struc-
tures correlate with their argumentation patterns. We focus on the Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 example with the agents exchanging affective arguments:
Dutch investigators, The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, and the
self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. It is a controversial conflict where
each agent attempts to blame its opponent. Keywords indicating sentiments
are underlined. To sound more convincing, each agent does not just formu-
late its claim, but postulates it in a way to attack the claims of its opponents.
To do that, each agent does its best to match the argumentation style of
opponents, defeat their claims, and apply negative sentiments to them.

Dutch accident investigators say that strong evidence points to pro-Russian
rebels as being fully responsible for shooting down plane. The report indicates
where the missile was fired from and identifies who was in control of the
territory and pins the downing of MH17 on the pro-Russian rebels
(Fig. 11.2A).
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation believes that
the plane was hit by a missile, which could not be produced in Russia. The
committee cites an investigation that established the type of the missile
and disagrees with Dutch accident investigators (Fig. 11.2B).
Rebels, the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, deny that they
controlled the territory from which the missile was allegedly fired. They
confirm that it became possible only after three months after the tragedy
to say if rebels controlled one or another town and the claim of Dutch
accident investigators is flawed (Fig. 11.2C).

To show the structure of arguments one needs to merge discourse rela-
tions with information from speech acts. We need to know the discourse
structure of interactions between agents, and what kinds of interactions they
are. For argument identification we do not need to know the domain of
interaction (here, aviation), the subjects of these interaction, what are the
entities, but we need to take into account the mental, domain-independent
relations between them. We accomplish this by introducing the concept of
communicative discourse tree (CDT).
CDT is a DT with labels for edges that are the VerbNet expressions for
verbs (which are communicative actions or CA; Galitsky & Kuznetsov,
2008). Arguments of verbs are substituted from text according to VerbNet
frames (Kipper, Korhonen, Ryant, & Palmer, 2008). The first and possibly
second argument is instantiated by agents. The consecutive arguments are
instantiated by noun or verb phrases, which are the subjects of CA. For
example, the nucleus node for elaboration relation (on the left of