Debating Technology for Dialogical Argument: Sensemaking, Engagement and Analytics

Debating Technologies, a newly emerging strand of research into computational technologies to support human debating, offer a powerful way of providing naturalistic, dialogue-based interaction with complex information spaces. The full potential of debating technologies for dialogical argument can, however, only be realised once key technical and engineering challenges are overcome, viz., data structure, data availability and interoperability between components. Our aim in this paper is to show that The Argument Web, a vision for integrated, reusable, semantically-rich resources connecting views, opinions arguments and debates online, offers a solution to these challenges. Through the use of a running example taken from the domain of Citizen Dialogue, we demonstrate for the first time that different Argument Web components focusing on sensemaking, engagement and analytics can work in concert as a suite of debating technologies for rich, complex, dialogical argument.