HAGARICE - Harnessing Argumentation Graphs in Augmented Reality for Immersive Co-Creation and Exploration

• Scientific lead: YUN Bruno
• Is SyCoSMA the project lead? Yes
• Start date: 2024-01-01
• End date: 2024-12-31

This project aims to develop the tools for an improved collaborative creation of argumentation graphs and their exploitation for assisted reasoning. Existing online argumentation platforms often depict a debate using a directed graph, offering a visual representation that enhances human grasp of the arguments and their interconnections. These platforms have various applications in domains such as education or e-democracy, where they facilitate broad public involvement in the development of laws. However, there are several problems preventing their adoption for assisted reasoning:

1. Information overload - As these platforms become increasingly prevalent, the volume of arguments and options within these systems continues to grow exponentially. This poses a significant hurdle for human analysts, who struggle to manually track changes, understand the various arguments and their relationships, and make sense of the vast amount of information;
2. Lack of guidance - Users are not assisted in constructing their various arguments within a debate. This deficiency can result in irrationality, omission of critical information, and the establishment of relationships with incorrect polarity, particularly when confronted with complex arguments;
3. Incomplete graphs - Users introduce new support or counter arguments into the system in reaction to a specific local argument. Typically, these new arguments may be redundant or engage with remote arguments that users have not taken into account, resulting in incomplete graphs. Consequently, the conventional argumentation semantics outlined in the literature become inapplicable;
4. Asynchronous reasoning - Current research in real-time assisted reasoning within real-life debates using argumentation graphs remains limited. Existing approaches predominantly involve manual argument formalization or users selecting arguments from dropdown menus, interrupting the natural flow of the debate.

This project will provide solutions for the aforementioned problems.