[Ltg] HAIL Seminar *Reminder* (25th January): Dr Floriana Grasso, University of Liverpool, UK

[Andrew Lampert]

                      H.A.I.L. Seminar series
                          CSIRO ICT Centre
                   http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/


Title:          Characterising Rhetorical Argumentation

Speaker:        Dr Floriana Grasso
                Department of Computer Science
                University of Liverpool, UK

Date:           Tuesday 25th January 2005 at 11am

Location:       CSIRO ICT Centre,
                Building E6B, Macquarie University.

                NOTE: Due to construction work, access to the
                CSIRO ICT Centre in Building E6B has changed.

                See http://www.ict.csiro.au/HAIL/location.htm for details.


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Abstract

The study of argumentation has undergone periods of decadence alternate with periods of renaissance. Currently, we are witnessing one of the latter, as proved by research flowering in many issues and aspects, both in Philosophy and in Artificial Intelligence. The work presented in this talk is concerned in particular with ``rhetorical argumentation'', which on the other hand has enjoyed consideration to a somewhat lesser extent. By rhetorical arguments we denote arguments which are both heavily based on the audience's perception of the world, and concerned more with evaluative judgments than with establishing the truth or otherwise of a proposition.

Rather than a logic focus on argumentative reasoning, or a pure computational linguistic focus on modelling discourse which happens to be argumentative, we place ourselves halfway and specifically focus on the characterisation of rhetorical argumentative discourse. Methodologically, we do this by explicitly drawing upon the philosophy of argument. We present a framework for the formalisation of rhetorical argumentation inspired by a well established philosophical theory, the New Rhetoric. We consider Health Promotion as an application domain for this theory, and we introduce PIPS (Personalised Information Platform for Life and Health Services), a newly funded European Integrated Project in the e-Health domain.


Short resume

Floriana Grasso has a "Laurea summa cum laude" in Information Science from the University of Bari, Italy, and a PhD in Computer Science from Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, UK.

Since 1998 she has been a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, UK, associated with the Agent ART Group, lead by Profs. Mike Wooldridge and Wiebe van der Hoek. She is also Deputy Director of the University e-Learning Unit. Prior to joining UoL, she was research associate at Heriot Watt University, on an EPSRC project on Techniques for Personalising Patient Education.

Her main research interests range over two main streams: Computational Linguistics, and Cognitive Modelling, with specific interests in natural language argumentation/negotiation, and modelling of cognitive aspects, personalities, emotions and other extra-rational features of believable agents.


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