Computational Argument as a Diagnostic Tool: The role of reliability

Formal and computational models of argument are ideally suited for education in ill-defined domains such as law, public policy, and science. Open-ended arguments play a central role in these areas but students of the domains may not have been taught an explicit model of argument. Computational models of argument may be ideally suited to act as argument tutors guiding students in the formation of arguments and argument analysis according to an explicit model. In order to achieve this it is important to establish that the models can be understood and evaluated reliably, an empirical question. In this paper we report ongoing work on the diagnostic utility of argument diagrams produced in the LARGO tutoring system.