Grammar-based argument construction

Abstract

The science of history motivates the investigation on how arguments are constructed, which are later to be used in argumentation frameworks. This is difficult as much arguments in history are frequently built upon sources which are mutually inconsistent. In this paper it is shown how formal grammars can be employed in order to construct arguments. Thereby, it is investigated how the interplay of expressiveness and parsing effciency motivates in particular to use mildly context sensitive grammars. These systems are more expressive than context free grammars, but can still be parsed within polynomial time. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.