Abstract: This talk will describe current projects involving uses of arguments in two domains. The goal of the first project is to automatically identify and represent a scientist’s arguments in biomedical/biological research articles. Towards this goal, we have identified a number of patterns of reasoning, called argument schemes, employed in that genre. We developed a prototype system that implements the argument schemes as rules in a logic programming language. Given a partial semantic interpretation of a research article, the rules could be used to “mine” its arguments. The goal of the second project is to develop tools that support critical thinking. An argument diagramming tool for constructing arguments, AVIZE, was developed for students and analysts of international studies. AVIZE is designed for users to graphically create arguments based upon evidence of varying plausibility collected from sources of varying reliability. The tool supports the user by providing a set of argument schemes that we identified by analysis of patterns of reasoning employed in articles written by experts in international studies.

Short Bio: Dr. Nancy Green is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She completed undergraduate studies in Engineering and English at Michigan State University and North Carolina State University. Before and during her graduate studies she was employed as a software engineer. She received the M.A in Linguistics from UNC Chapel Hill, the M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware.  She was a postdoctoral research associate and researcher from 1994 to 1998 in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University before coming to UNC Greensboro in 1999.  Recently she has collaborated with the Laboratory for Analytic Science at NC State University. Her research interests are in symbolic AI approaches to reasoning and argumentation; educational argument modeling systems; natural language processing (natural language generation, discourse and dialogue); narrative; human-computer interaction (multimedia presentation, virtual agents); and ethics of software engineering and AI.