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goals and exchange arguments to further or defend
their standpoints during interaction. We are
considering such type of interaction as a kind of
debate. In Section 3 a formal model of debate was
presented. Here we would like to place this
treatment in a more general context by explaining
our understanding of the relationships between such
concepts as negotiation, debate and argumentation
(and some other concepts) as used in the paper. Of
the three types of (verbal) interaction named before,
argumentation as a process of exchanging certain
types of assertions for or against some standpoint,
decision etc. surely is the most neutral one. To
introduce a still more general concept: also a simple
discussion of some topic can have the form of
exchanging arguments. Participants of a discussion
hold and defend their views but are open to learning
and accepting alternative views; in a prototypical
discussion there are no winners and losers. At the
same time, in discussion as in every argumentative
communication event its participants must reason,
i.e. make use of their reasoning model, have and
monitor model(s) of partner(s), use certain
communicative strategies and tactics based on these
models, etc.
In the same sense argumentation constitutes a
necessary part of negotiations and debates. But there
is a critical difference as compared with discussions
in the above sense. The origin of this difference lies
in the motivational sphere of the participants and
their communicative goals: these dictate the ways in
which the reasoning processes in every participant
are directed to construct suitable arguments,
communicative strategies and tactics.
Both in negotiation and in debate there are
clearly fixed ‘sides’ with different goals as
considering the outcome of the communicative
event. But negotiation covers much more divergent
possible variants than debate. The main uniting
feature of all variants of negotiation is that the
participants start the communicative event with the
ultimate aim to reach an agreement which (at least in
theory) is seen as a compromise, that is, all sides are
ready to accept some losses. However, the ways of
reaching this aim (strategies, tactics) can be quite
different in case of different types of negotiation.
Debates, on the other hand, are adversarial
events from the start: the participants have
conflicting goals and the aim of each participant is to
promote his or her goal only. It is this feature of the
debates, first of all, because of which we chose
‘debate’ as the cover term for the type of
communicative events we were analyzing.
Let us stress that this characteristics of debate
does not free its participants from the need to carry
out active reasoning and ‘working’ with the partner
model during the event. This is well illustrated by
the Example 2 in the previous section. But since
these processes are focused on promoting the
participant’s own goals without the need to consider
the additional task of reaching a compromise, the
choices between different strategies, tactics and even
concrete dialogue acts are less restricted, the task of
building computer model of debate in this sense is
easier than doing it for negotiations in general.
At the same time, proceeding from such a model
of debate to a general model of negotiation requires
only elaboration of the acceptable communicative
strategies and tactics, and of the underlying
reasoning procedures used by the participants. Of
course, the ontological, domain-specific aspects of
treating the corresponding problems – e. g what can
be considered a compromise in a concrete situation –
become more important accordingly.
6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
We are studying the interactions where one
participant, A, has the communicative goal that his
partner B will make a decision “do an action D”. B’s
goal, on the contrary, is “do not do D”. When
debating, A is trying to influence the partner’s
reasoning processes in such a way that B will
abandon her initial goal and decides to do D.
We introduced a model of debate which includes
exchange of arguments and counter-arguments. A
model of argument (counter-argument) is presented
which consists of a partner model (or, respectively, a
model of herself for B), a reasoning procedure which
A tries to trigger in B (or what B is implementing),
communicative tactics and (a set of) proposition(s)
(utterances) which together would bring to B’s
conclusion “do D” (or for B, respectively, “do not do
D”). The conclusion (decision about doing D) is
interpreted as a claim in the structure of an argument
(counter-argument).
We evaluated our model on actual human-human
debates taken from a dialogue corpus. The corpus
study gives an opportunity to believe that the
introduced model can be used for the analysis and
modelling of human-human dialogues.
The natural way to proceed in developing the
conceptual abilities of our model is to elaborate it –
for certain ontological domains – to cover also
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