Edinburgh Napier University

  Arguments are structures of premises and conclusions that underpin rational reasoning processes. Within complex knowledge domains, especially if they are contentious, argument structures can become large and complex. Visualisation tools have been developed that support argument analysts and help them to work with arguments. Until recently, arguments were manually analysed from natural language text, or constructed from scratch, but new communication modes mean that increasing amounts of debate and the arguments therein can be captured digitally. Furthermore, new tools and techniques for argument mining are beginning to automate the process of extracting argument structure from natural language; leading to much larger argument datasets that present problems for the current generation of argument visualization tools. Additionally, individual argument analysts have different foci which can lead to increased complexity within datasets, and additional facets that argument visualisations should account for but do not.

We are developing a tool for interacting with argument corpora that enable users to explore and understand the reasoning structure of large-scale arguments. The developed tool will support a range of interactivity techniques and will help users to explore and analyse large-scale arguments, to more rapidly comprehend complex new problem domains.