The paper “A Natural Language Account for Argumentation Schemes” by Elena Cabrio, Sara Tonelli and Serena Villata has been accepted at the 13th Conference of the Italian Association of Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2013), Turin, Italy.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

“One of the essential activities carried out by humans in everyday linguistic interactions is the act of drawing a conclusion from given facts through some forms of reasoning. Given a sequence of statements (i.e. the premises), humans are able to infer or derive a conclusion that follows from the facts described in the premises. In the computational linguistics field, discourse analyses have been conducted to identify the discourse structure of connected text, i.e. the nature of the discourse relationships between sentences. In parallel, research in argumentation theory has proposed argumentation schemes as structures for defining various kinds of arguments. Although the two fields of study are strongly intertwined, only a few works have put them into relation. However, a clear natural language account for argumentation schemes is still missing. To address this open issue, our work analyzes how argumentation schemes fit into the discourse relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank.”