Collaborative Decision Making: A Connectionist Paradigm for Dialectical Support

Abstract

The facilitation and analytical support of argumentation-based collaborative decision making is the focus of this research. We model collaborative decision making as an argumentation process. We develop a connectionist modeling framework, a network representation formalism for argument structures, connectionist network mechanisms, and their models of computations to extract the behavior of argument structures. We use two examples from the case study literature to illustrate the concepts. Several interesting properties of the connectionist network models are observed from our computational results. We find that although the length of the computation is affected by parametric values, the final activation levels of the units are largely unaffected. We observe that the initial activation levels of the defeasible units seem to have no effect on their final activation levels. The proposed modeling approach generates valuable insights into the characteristics of specific argumentative discussions. While the intention of this work is not to introduce the connectionist paradigm as a means to bring arguments to a closure (resolution), we show that certain resolution mechanisms can be easily implemented under the connectionist framework.

Text Analytics to Support Sense-Making in Social Media: A Language-Action Perspective

“…Hence, using LAP principles, a conversation can be decomposed into a beginning act succeeded by a series of "reacting" or "continuing moves" (Auramaki et al 1992). A primitive message is a stand-alone assertion, and a derivative message is defined as a strictly logical or defeasible consequence of others (Raghu et al 2001). Hence, primitive message identification is of great importance for disentanglement (Khan et al 2002), as subsequent response messages are highly dependent upon it in terms of their illocutionary acts and propositional content Winograd and Flores 1986).…”

Addressing the homeland security problem: A collaborative decision‐making framework

“…The basic computational details of the connectionist architecture are described in Raghu, Ramesh, Chang, and Whinston (2001). Briefly, arguments in a discussion are structured into basic, atomic‐level information units along with their logical and other human‐intended relationships.…”

“…The basic formalism for our connectionist approach is available in Raghu et al (2001). We briefly describe the argumentation formalism here.…”

“…We briefly describe the argumentation formalism here. For a detailed discussion please refer to Raghu et al (2001). The discussion of inference rules and incorporation of information source reliability are additional contributions in this paper.…”

“…For a detailed discussion on the specific mechanisms of connectionist computations please refer to Raghu et al (2001). The following section presents extensions to the basic argumentation structure for enhancing inference capabilities.…”