Organizing Argumentation Statements to Support Intelligence Analysis Tim Chklovski USC/ISI 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292 001-310-822-1511 timc@isi.edu Jihie Kim USC/ISI 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292 001-310-822-1511 jihie@isi.edu Yolanda Gil USC/ISI 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292 001-310-822-1511 gil@isi.edu ABSTRACT Understanding how to organize argumentation statements is important to effectively support intelligence analysis. One common approach to supporting analysis is with semi-structured argumentation interfaces, in which the user interrelates and organizes individual free-text analysis units to form a coherent overall argument. An important issue in the semi-structured argumentation approach is what expressivity and structuring assistance should be provided to the users in composing statements into a coherent analysis. At the same time, such interfaces can benefit from being easy to learn while being able to support analyses of different structures and in different domains. Based on our experiences of designing such easy-to-use, yet expressive interfaces, we argue for a particular approach to capturing overall argument structure: as a hierarchy of potentially heterogeneous nodes, with each node using a representation which matches the type of the analysis at that node. Node-level representations we have found promising include pro/con analysis and comparison of alternative competing hypotheses. To support additional analysis types suggested by our experience, we anticipate that additional representations, e.g., an event-structure based representation, may need to be added. We conclude by discussing opportunities for automatic assistance with specific analysis tasks, given this “hierarchy of heterogeneous nodes” approach. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces. H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems] General Terms: Design, Human Factors. Keywords: Structured argumentation, intelligent user interfaces 1. INTRODUCTION Due to the emergence of asymmetric threats, intelligence analysis increasingly needs to support rapid analyses on a broad variety of topics. One common approach to supporting such analyses is using semi-structured argumentation interfaces, in which the user interrelates and organizes individual analysis units which denote pieces of evidence and working hypotheses to form the overall argument [e.g., 7,14,8]. An important issue in the semi-structured argumentation approach is what expressivity and structuring assistance should be provided to the users in composing statements into a coherent whole. Over the past several years, our group has explored a number of designs in this space [5,8]. Based on our experiences in designing such approaches and on feedback from intelligence analysts and other subjects who used our tools, we argue for a particular approach to capturing argumentation structure, namely a hierarchy of potentially heterogeneous nodes, with each node using a representation which matches the type of the analysis at that node. Related work on structured argumentation often aims to support capture of a finished argument or incrementally adding to an argument [12,14,7]. It typically does not emphasize a more bottom-up approach of restructuring and modification in the process of evolving an argument from disconnected but potentially related pieces. Our “hierarchy of heterogeneous nodes” approach stems from our emphasis on ease of understanding, managing, and evolving the created argument. Other related work has also looked at improving activities related to sense-making, e.g. extracting summary statements from textual sources [11] or visualization of analyses (e.g. [15]). Such investigations also influenced our choice of proposed approach, as it is desirable for the approach to be integrated with these related techniques. The rest of the paper points out some difficulties with creating, interpreting and updating highly expressive but elaborate argument structures, details our proposal for and experiences with structuring arguments, and finally discusses the opportunities for supporting the user in sense-making and related tasks afforded by the approach we advocate. 2. STRUCTURING ANALYSIS UNITS We argue that overly specific semantic relations between analysis units, while possibly useful for capturing the details of an analysis, is not necessarily desirable in realistic settings. We also argue that interconnections in an argumentation system should be restricted to make the structure easier to grasp and to simplify updating of an argument. We have started by exploring an approach supporting a variety of expressive, semantically defined connectors between individual statements. The connectors were motivated by rhetorical structures, logical relations, temporal relations, and so on. The approach also did not impose any restrictions or provide guidance on which statements could be interconnected, allowing formation of complex networks of connections between arbitrary statements, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. IUI workshop on Intelligence Analysis, Jan 29, 2006, Sydney, Australia. Copyright 2006 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00. Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces for Intelligence Analysis, 2006 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Sydney, Australia, 2006.