Artificial argumentation for humans

Abstract

The latest years have seen an increasing interest in the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the challenges it is facing, and the recent advances it has achieved, e.g., intelligent personal assistants. Differently from the past, where research on AI was mainly confined in research labs, the topic is now attracting interest from a wider audience, including policy-makers, information technology companies, and philosophers. Alas, these advances have also raised a number of concerns on AI's social, economic, and legal impact. Hence, the definition of design principles and automated methods to support transparent intelligent machine deliberation is highly desirable. Argumentation is important for handling conflicting beliefs, assumptions, opinions, goals, and many other mental attitudes. Argumentation pervades human intelligent behavior, and I believe that it is a mandatory element to conceive autonomous artificial machines that can exploit argumentation models and tools in the cognitive tasks they are required to carry out. Results in this area will allow reducing the gap between humans and machines towards a good AI hybrid society.