Computational Models of Natural Language Argument Chris Reed 1 and Floriana Grasso 2 1 Department of Applied Computing, University of Dundee, Scotland chris@computing.dundee.ac.uk 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, England floriana@csc.liv.ac.uk Abstract. This paper offers an introduction to the 2001 Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Language Argument (CMNLA 2001), a special event of the International Conference on Computational Sci- ence. The contributors to the workshop represent, in their backgrounds, the diversity of fields upon which the focus of the event draws. As a result, this paper aims not only to introduce the accepted papers, but also to provide a background that will be accessible to researchers in the various fields, and to sit each work into a coherent context. 1 Introduction There is rapidly growing interest in the applications of argumentation for com- puter reasoning. One of the most mature and substantial research projects in the area is Pollock’s OSCAR system [36], but the use of argumentation and di- alectics in computational contexts has become increasingly popular, and with a variety of aims. Emphasis has been put on many aspects of the argumentation process: from the study on the structure of “valid” arguments [13,26], to the way complex arguments can be unreeled [9,48]. Argumentation is starting to play a key role in communication in multi-agent systems with significant results reported, inter alia, in [32]. Perhaps not by coincidence, argumentation theory itself has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years, demonstrated by the wide and extensive bibliography offered by [43]. Surprisingly, the ways in which arguments are rendered in natural language, the most obvious vehicle for the purpose, have not been investigated at depth, apart from few exceptions [10,28,31,37]. The endeavour is particularly challeng- ing, both for computational linguists and for computer scientists, as argumenta- tion is typically rich with rhetorical devices interacting at many different layers of abstraction, and is heavily dependent upon extra-linguistic context if it is to be successful. Moreover, a vast literature on both argumentation theory and rhetoric can offer great potential for exploitation, and, as in many other computa- tional modelling problems, cross-disciplinary fertilisation is crucial for achieving significant results. The 2001 Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Language Argu- ment (CMNLA 2001) aims exactly at bringing this issue into the limelight. V.N. Alexandrov et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2001, LNCS 2073, pp. 999–1008, 2001. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001