Trichotomic Argumentation Representation

TL;DR

This paper introduces T-AIF, an extension of argumentation frameworks that incorporates Aristotle's three aspects of argumentation—Logos, Ethos, and Pathos—by adding trust and commitment weights to represent ethical and emotional dimensions.

Contribution

The paper develops T-AIF, a novel structured argumentation format that captures all three Aristotelian aspects by extending existing formats with weighted edges for trust and commitment.

Findings

Enables representation of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos in a unified graph.

Allows semantic profiling of reasoning patterns of actors.

Extends the capabilities of existing argumentation formats.

Abstract

The Aristotelian trichotomy distinguishes three aspects of argumentation: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos. Even rich argumentation representations like the Argument Interchange Format (AIF) are only concerned with capturing the Logos aspect. Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT) adds the possibility to represent ethical requirements on the illocutionary force edges linking locutions to illocutions, thereby allowing to capture some aspects of ethos. With the recent extensions AIF+ and Social Argument Interchange Format (S-AIF), which embed dialogue and speakers into the AIF argumentation representation, the basis for representing all three aspects identified by Aristotle was formed. In the present work, we develop the Trichotomic Argument Interchange Format (T-AIF), building on the idea from S-AIF of adding the speakers to the argumentation graph. We capture Logos in the usual known from AIF+, Ethos in form of weighted edges between actors representing trust, and Pathos via weighted edges from actors to illocutions representing their level of commitment to the propositions. This extended structured argumentation representation opens up new possibilities of defining semantic properties on this rich graph in order to characterize and profile the reasoning patterns of the participating actors.