The priority program seeks a paradigm shift in which individual facts are replaced by coherent argumentative structures as information units for decision-making, and are systematically and explicitly prepared. For this purpose, new methods are needed that can extract arguments and their relationships from documents as well as new semantic models and ontologies for the deep representation of arguments. New search methods are needed that can index arguments, find relevant arguments for a search query and make them accessible to specific interaction with a human user. In addition, new methods of machine reasoning have to be developed in order to evaluate the implications of arguments and their plausibility.

These goals require the cooperation of different disciplines, which are to cooperate for the first time within the framework of a priority program of computer science. Combining competences is the prerequisite for the creation of a paradigm shift, which places argumentative contexts instead of individual facts in the center of information processing and results in a far-reaching potential for new applications in the field of engineering, medicine, finance and online commerce, politics and the humanities, and law.

News: 1st International Conference on Recent Advances in Robust Argumentation Machines (RATIO-24)