Reason-checking fake news

Abstract

Using argument technology to strengthen critical literacy skills for assessing media reports.

Pandemic Communication Without Argumentative Strategy in the Digital Age: A Cautionary Tale and a Call to Arms

“…In this day and age, this means tackling the issue of virality-not as an enemy to fight or a cancer to eradicate, but rather as a tool to exploit. So far, argumentation theorists have focused almost exclusively on negative viral contents, first and foremost on fake news: either to refine the definition of the phenomenon (Gelfert, 2018), to articulate how it has subverted normal standards of argumentative reasonableness (Neville-Shepard, 2019), to document how it feeds on lack of analytic reasoning (Pennycook & Rand, 2019), to suggest argument-inspired technologies to help dealing with it (Visser et al, 2020), to understand how deviant argumentative behaviours, e.g. trolling, shed light on how digital technologies change argumentation itself (Cohen, 2017), or to demonstrate how the very notion of disinformation can be used as a fallacious rhetorical device, e.g.…”

Enforcing Sets of Formulas in Structured Argumentation

“…Each of these examples studies the question how to revise the argumentation framework to obtain good conclusions, which is the central question in belief revision. In contrast, enforcement as studied in this paper is useful for structured argumentation applications based on dialogues, which are exactly the kind of applications that have been implemented at the Dutch National Police and in other application domains, see e.g., (Chalaguine et al 2018;Visser, Lawrence, and Reed 2020).…”

“…Our study of enforcement in a structured argumentation setting is not only interesting from a theoretical perspective. There are many real-world applications of structured argumentation, including those in legal reasoning (Prakken 2020), crime and forensics (Bex, Testerink, and Peters 2016;, medicine ( Čyras et al 2020;Zeng et al 2020), technologies for behaviour change (Chalaguine et al 2018) and debunking fake news (Visser, Lawrence, and Reed 2020). In these application domains, dynamics and specifically enforcement for structured argumentation is imperative.…”

Can the crowd judge truthfulness? A longitudinal study on recent misinformation about COVID-19

“…Truthfulness classification and the process of fact-checking are strongly related to the scrutiny of factual information extensively studied in argumentation theory [ 3 , 28 , 54 , 61 , 64 , 68 ]. Lawrence and Reed [ 28 ] survey the techniques which are the foundations for argument mining, i.e., extracting and processing the inference and structure of arguments expressed using natural language.…”

“…Lawrence and Reed [ 28 ] survey the techniques which are the foundations for argument mining, i.e., extracting and processing the inference and structure of arguments expressed using natural language. Sethi [ 54 ] leverages argumentation theory and proposes a framework to verify the truthfulness of facts, Visser et al [ 64 ] uses it to increase the critical thinking ability of people who assess media reports, Sethi et al [ 55 ] uses it together with pedagogical agents in order to develop a recommendation system to help fighting misinformation, and Snaith et al [ 57 ] present a platform based on a modular architecture and distributed open source for argumentation and dialogue.…”