Abstract
Tools for e-participation are becoming increasingly important. In this paper we argue that existing tools exhibit a number of limitations, and that these can be addressed by basing tools on developments in the field of computational argumentation. After discussing the limitations, we present an argumentation scheme which can be used to justify policy proposals, and a way of modelling the domain so that arguments using this scheme and attacks upon them can be automatically generated. We then present two prototype tools: one to present justifications and receive criticism, and the other to elicit justifications of user-proposed policies and critique them. We use a running example of a genuine policy debate to illustrate the various aspects.
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Notes
- 1.
The first author worked as a Civil Servant for the UK Department of Health and Social Security in the late seventies, and part of his duties was replying to such correspondence.
- 2.
The IMPACT project ran from January 2010 until December 2012. The tools described here are predominately those that provided the context for the developments of that project, which are the main topic of this paper. Since then, social media, especially Twitter, has become widely used, and several e-participation developments have attempted to reflect this. Thus the focus remains very much on the communications channel, and it remains true that there has been little attention paid to providing more structure and coherence to the utterances.
- 3.
A very similar site, launched by the current Conservative administration, is currently (2014) available at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk.
- 4.
All websites accessed April 24, 2014.
- 5.
http://publicreadingstage.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ (archive only).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
In order to keep matters simple we chose to restrict goals to elements of \(\varPhi \) and conjunctions thereof for both our tools. The machinery to handle more complex goals is fully described in [1].
- 11.
Where motorist is an abstraction to use the ‘collective’ interpretation of ‘motorist’.
- 12.
The application shown in the screenshot is that addressed by the IMPACT project, concerning a copyright topic. See [18].
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Acknowledgements
This paper represents a consolidated version of work carried out at the University of Liverpool on the European project IMPACT (FP7-ICT-2009-4 Programme, Grant Number 247228). The views are those of the authors. It is a revised and much extended version of a keynote talk given by the first author at DEXA 2013 in Prague [8]. It draws on a series of earlier papers: especially [3, 25, 26, 28]. We would particularly like to thank our colleagues Maya Wardeh, who did much of the implementation, Dan Cartwright, who explored an earlier version of the Structured Consultation Tool (Parmenides) in his PhD thesis [9], and colleagues on the IMPACT project. The work described here has its ultimate origins in [13], also presented in Prague.
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Bench-Capon, T., Atkinson, K., Wyner, A. (2015). Using Argumentation to Structure E-Participation in Policy Making. In: Hameurlain, A., Küng, J., Wagner, R., Decker, H., Lhotska, L., Link, S. (eds) Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems XVIII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8980. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46485-4_1
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