Testing Formal Dialectic

Systems of argumentation or ’computational dialectic’ are emerging as a powerful means of structuring inter-agent communication in multi-agent systems. Individual systems of computational dialectic have been suggested and implemented to tackle specific problems but no comprehensive and comparative assessment has been made of such systems. This paper introduces ScenarioGC0, a framework for the implementation and testing of a wide range of computational dialectic systems. ScenarioGC0 has a range of benefits for both theoretical and practical work in computational dialectics, including: a means to test arbitrary dialectic systems using a unified knowledge base; a means to determine standard metrics by which dialectic systems can be measured and compared; enabling a body of example dialogue to be assembled for each dialectic system to demonstrate their qualities.