Sarah George
School of Computer Science and
Software Engineering
Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3800,
AUSTRALIA
email: sarahg@csse.monash.edu.au
Bias is the Bayesian Interactive Argumentation System. It is a prototype system implemented to test the idea that Bayesian networks can be used as a basis for an argumentation system and that people can profitably interact with such a system.
The UI, aside from being a pretty front end for Bias, co-ordinates the running of the other programs that constitute Bias. Although the User Interface is the only part the user really sees, these programs, written by Nathalie Jitnah (njitnah@csse.monash.edu.au) and Richard McConachy (ricky@csse.monash.edu.au), are the main part of Bias. They do all the argument generation, making sense of the user's rebuttal, etc.
I am documenting only the user interface here because that's the part I wrote.
Most of the time, the UI lets the user explore nodes in the network, and reports to Bias on the user's activities.
When the user says they want an argument, another program is run to produce an Argument Graph (AG) describing the argument Bias wants to make. The AG has no worded English, just the node names Bias wants to dicuss and the relationships it wants to point out between them. It also contains various hints like where to break paragraphs etc.
The User Interface translates the AG into English, presents it to the user, and lets them continue their exploration.
The rebuttal menu is available to the user once an argument has been presented. The basic function of the menu is to report to one of the programs a rebuttal of the form "[but/consider] NodeName". The user constructs a worded sentence using fragments of node names so that they never see a complete list of the nodes. Given the number of nodes, this is also a convenient way to make the menu sizes more manageable for the user.
Once the rebuttal has been passed on to the main Bias programs, they return a list of mini-arguments that it thinks the user might have meant. The UI displays these so the user can select which one was intended. Finally the UI sends this selection on to the main programs and gets a new AG back, in response to the user's rebuttal.
Data Files (More than half the errors found so far are data-file related. This is mostly because I don't like hard-coding things and end up moving most of the rules, patterns etc to data files.