Semantics of opinion transitions in multi-agent forum argumentation

Abstract

There are online forums such as changemyview where a user may submit his/her views on a subject matter, against which other users argue to try to change the opinions of his/hers. To measure the quality of such discussion, one useful criterion is how influential a given topic is to participating users’ opinion changes, as may be measured by the change (if any) in the proportion of supporting-objecting-mixed opinions by users. In this work, we incorporate the notion of agency into a previously proposed argumentation framework for issue-based information systems, QuAD, and formulate semantics of opinion transitions by newly considering agent-wise evaluation of QuAD initial scores.