Building user argumentative models

Knowing how a user builds his/her arguments during a discussion gives useful advantages if we want to assist the user or analyse his/her argumentative skills. This paper presents a novel mechanism to build user argumentative models, which captures the argumentative style to generate arguments. To this end, we observe how users generate arguments, and apply a generalised association rules algorithm to discover rules for argument generation. These rules depict the argumentative style of the user. They are composed of an antecedent, which represents the conditions to build an argument, and a consequent, which represents such argument. To evaluate this proposal, we show results obtained in the domain of meeting scheduling. We discovered interesting rules from a group of users discussing in that domain, and checked that about 60% of the arguments that users had generated in a test situation can be also generated from the rules previously learnt, at least partially. Finally, although this work focuses on modelling users’ argumentative style, we discuss how this promising approach could be applied in different knowledge domains.