Haskell Gets Argumentative

Argumentation theory is an interdisciplinary field studying how conclusions can be reached through logical reasoning. The notion of argument is completely general, including for example legal arguments, scientific arguments, and political arguments. Computational argumentation theory is studied in the context of artificial intelligence, and a number of computational argumentation frameworks have been put forward to date. However, there is a lack of concrete, high level realisations of these frameworks, which hampers research and applications at a number of levels. We hypothesise that the lack of suitable domain-specific languages in which to formalise argumentation frameworks is a contributing factor. In this paper, we present a formalisation of a particular computational argumentation framework, Carneades, as a case study with a view to investigate the extent to which functional languages are useful as a means to realising computational argumentation frameworks and reason about them.