Using an Intelligent Agent to Improve Argumentation Skills over HyperNews

We describe an intelligent agent that provides students with suitable online argumentation strategies and rhetorical methods in a computer-supported collaborative argumentation environment. Computer-based arguments contain many regular patterns that occur with high frequency. Further more, these regular patterns are often related with argumentation strategies. Armed with this knowledge, the intelligent agent first retrieves regular patterns from high quality computer-based arguments, then saves them into its corpus of regular patterns. Each pattern is assigned with several suitable argumentation strategies and rhetorical methods. When students write articles either to support or to argue against a viewpoint, the intelligent agent can provide immediate strategies by matching regular patterns in related arguments. If a pattern is matched in arguments, it will retrieve argumentation strategies and rhetorical methods that are associated with that pattern, and then present them to the students. We implemented our intelligent agent on the platform of HyperNews. The regular pattern corpus has been tested with many webbased arguments. Experimental results show that, using our approach, students can readily improve the quality of their arguments with the help of this intelligent agent.