Toward an Argument Evaluation System on Cultural Heritage based on Anchoring Inference Theory

45th Computer Applications and Quantitive Methods in Archaeology conference (CAA)

Atlanta. Estados Unidos
Congreso. 2017

Research on Cultural Heritage works within a research framework different to the well-known hypothetic-deductive method. This means that the conclusions or claims resulting from every particular research work must be supported by good and sound arguments rather than unquestionable proofs.

To the best of our knowledge, the current methodological approaches to Cultural Heritage lack a well-defined framework for argument evaluation. In order to establish its foundations, we propose to use Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT). This is a conceptual tool to annotate and represent arguments in the form of graphs, which allow us to connect dialogical structures or texts with argumentative ones, as well as the entities in the world that the discourse refers to. AIT is supported by computational tools, such as OVA (http://ova.arg-tech.org/), and can be combined with Argumentation Schemes theory, which provide us solid grounds for an argument evaluation system.

In this paper we describe an initial proposal for an AIT-based framework for the evaluation of archaeological arguments, and illustrate it with some examples taken from archaeological reports and similar sources.

Argument evaluation. Argumentation theory. Cultural heritage. Computational model.