AIF 2.0 Meeting

Wow, where did the last month go? I am recently back from the second Argument Interchange Format (AIF) meeting which was held at the Dalmunzie Hotel in rural Scotland. The list of delegates to this meeting read like a who’s who of online argumentation researchers – people who are developing argumentative tools which, in some way, communicate argumentative information between themselves and to their users.

All in all the meeting went well. We achieved the aim of writing a first draft of a specification for the second AIF which includes fixes for many of the problems we have discovered since the original format was specified and introduces some new elements that many of us have noticed were glaringly omitted from the original. In terms of running and organising the event, there were some things that went really well such as:

• Ensuring that all delegates prepared a position statement beforehand so that rather than meeting and starting with “what are we going to talk about” we got straight to the job of discussing the next version of AIF.
• The first night over dinner we all wrote questions onto post it notes that framed the sorts of things that we were interested in. These were used to create a number of topic/discussion groups (which later became major organising elements of the paper draft) and whittle the 23 delegates into a manageable number of working groups with shared interests.

Other things of course worked less well, for example,

• 23 computer scientists using Google Docs to collaboratively edit documents is fine. Except when you are in rural Scotland where your internet feed is provided via two-way satellite communications which are very quickly saturated, and suffer from fairly high latency anyhow.

Some lessons learned:

• Google Docs works quite well for collaboratively editing documents. Who knew? It even works well if you are using it to collaboratively edit LaTeX source, although obviously you don’t get to compile it to anything useful or check source errors within Google Docs.
• Make sure that people aren’t editing offline then copy-pasting into the Google Doc, as each time they do this they reintroduce the same errors that you just got finished fixing. (This one caused both myself and John to swear quite a bit)
• If you are working with LaTeX then don’t forget to install it onto your laptop before you go as you then have to shell into a remote server which has a working LaTeX environment in order to compile the aforementioned LaTeX source into a PDF.
• Set up a local network using a small wireless access point and make some shared directories available on a small server such as a mac mini so that you are not transmitting all that data over the hotel’s network all the time. We caused the Hotel to have to reset their router several times over the course of the meeting.
• Investigate collaborative software, such as Gobby, or a versioning system such as Mercurial that can run on the local server to keep track of the collaborative edits rather than relying on Google Docs. Although Google worked reasonable well I still had to go through the following steps to get a PDF generated:

1. Download the document from Google Docs as a txt file & save it as .tex file
2. Run the tex file through dos2unix
3. Get rid of any final non-printable ascii characters using the following:

   $ tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' < file-with-binary-chars
    > clean-file

4. Compile as usual.

My favourite element of the new specification is the inclusion of support for dynamic argumentation. I had attended the meeting with a clear personal plan to ensure that the AIF2.0 include support for dialogue and I was assigned to the working group on dialogue with Bart Verheij, Raquel Mochales , and David Glasspool. One of the things that quickly became apparent was that thinking of the AIF in terms of monologic and dialogic argument was quite limiting and that other researchers had quite clear needs which wouldn’t covered by an AIF which accounted for just arguments and dialogues. Instead what we developed was a model that saw the core AIF, version 1.0, as a model of static arguments and AIF2.0 as including both this as well as dynamic extensions that enable us to model not just dialogue but also other aspects of dynamic argument such as representing the order of argument elements for when analysing rhetorical and presentational aspects of an argument (thanks Raquel) and the history of the construction of an argument (thanks David).