Social Argumentation Systems

While a lot of research has been conducted on understanding and formalising the interplay of arguments within the context of Computational Argumentation, this research is not fully applicable to the types of arguments that populate the Social Web. In that context, arguments usually have the form of comments, opinions or reviews, and are the main ingredients of online discussion forums, social networks, online rating and review sites, debate portals and other online communities-the electronic version of word-of-mouth communication. As a result, voting and other forms of reaction to the provided comments or arguments (other than just “attacks”) are allowed, features that are not normally considered in the classical literature on Computational Argumentation. In this chapter, we study extensions of argumentation frameworks that have been proposed to describe and understand the more complex types of interactions among arguments that can be found in the Social Web, and present the current state-of-the-art, as well as open problems.