Toward Legal Argument Instruction with Graph Grammars and Collaborative Filtering Techniques

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for intelligent tutoring in the field of legal argumentation. In this approach, students study transcripts of US Supreme Court oral argument and create a graphical representation of argument flow as tests offered by attorneys being challenged by hypotheticals posed by Justices. The proposed system, which is based on the collaborative modeling framework Cool Modes, is capable of detecting three types of weaknesses in arguments; when it does, it presents the student with a self explanation prompt. This kind of feedback seems more appropriate than the "strong connective feedback" typically offered by model-tracing or constraint-based tutors. Structural and context weaknesses in arguments are handled by graph grammars, and the critical problem of detecting and dealing with content weaknesses in student contributions is addressed through a collaborative filtering approach, thereby avoiding the critical problem of natural language processing in legal argumentation. An early version of the system was pilot tested with two students.

Promoting Argumentation Competence: Extending from First- to Second-Order Scaffolding Through Adaptive Fading

“…That is why Baker (2009) argues that the point of CABLe is not necessarily changing learners' conceptions or beliefs, but rather broadening and deepening their views and making them more reasoned and reasonable, which will enable them to understand each other's point of view. This is an important distinction, because when learners perceive argumentation as competitive, it is likely that they will merely engage in what Asterhan and Schwarz (2009) call a Bdebate-type win-lose situation^as in law (see Pinkwart et al 2006Pinkwart et al , 2007, in which they try to refute their opponents' views and prove the superiority of their own arguments. This is more or less similar to a situation where argumentation merely serves as a means for persuasion or eristic argumentation (Bfighting^).…”

Supporting Students in the Analysis of Case Studies for Professional Ethics Education

“…Instead of evaluating the content of a text, students may be asked to represent their reasoning in a graphical form, and evaluation of the produced graphical representation of the text can be made. This approach was taken in several ITSs to evaluate students' scientific reasoning, such as the Belvedere system [98], and legal arguments, such as the Largo system [73]. The analysis of graphs is more amenable to machine processing than the analysis of arguments represented in textual form, which allows more reliable diagnosis of students' knowledge.…”

Re-evaluating LARGO in the Classroom: Are Diagrams Better Than Text for Teaching Argumentation Skills?

“…The student has identified two tests in the argument transcript, one a modification of the other, three hypotheticals posed, and a number of relations among them that (in this student's diagram somewhat imperfectly) reflect the role the hypotheticals play in evaluating the tests. LARGO helps students to find, diagram and relate the important elements of the text by providing hints based on small specific argument patterns [10].…”

“…Presenting corrective feedback immediately after they make a mistake (as done by many successful ITS systems) would be problematic in the ill-defined domain of legal argumentation. As described in [10], LARGO's on-demand feedback avoids false error messages that are likely to occur in this domain, where it is often not clear whether a diagram correctly reflects an argument or not. False or inappropriate feedback would be very problematic also because the feedback LARGO gives is cognitively demanding (selfexplanation prompts).…”

“…The LARGO Intelligent Tutoring System [3,10,11] for legal argumentation supports students in the process of analyzing oral argument transcripts (taken from the U.S. Supreme Court). These are complex, real-world examples of the kind of Socratic arguing with tests and hypotheticals in which professors seek to engage students in class.…”