Inference Anchoring Theory and Argument Interchange Format

Speakers: Chris Reed, University of Dundee and Katarzyna Budzyńska, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University

The aim of the talk is to present the very recent development of Inference Anchoring Theory, IAT (Budzyńska & Reed 2011), which allows capturing of the illocutionary connection between communicative acts in dialogues and the knowledge structures that they yield. IAT explains how events in dialogue generate and manipulate inferential structures. The theory has its roots in several common starting points in pragmatics, in the theory of argument, and in theories of computation. IAT adopts the shared information state update (ISU) approach to the dynamics of in dialogue. In this way, each utterance in a dialogue updates a state that is shared and accessible to the dialogue participants. Like other ISU approaches, IAT defines the type and structure of data that is permitted in the information state, and allows for the definitions of rules governing the update operations that utterances effect. The work is part of a project which aims to build infrastructure for an online Argument Web which will support both the analysis, manipulation, assessment and display of billions of instances of inferential structures and also the conduct of millions of concurrent dialogues that generates them.