What do you mean? Arguing for Meaning

Building ontologies has been proven to be a complex issue in part because a community must commit to the conceptualization that the ontology represents. The community members must align their concepts and co-create. Arguing about a useful conceptualization is therefore an essential part of the process of designing an ontology. Logicians have developed formal argumentation theories, but have not combined formal argumentation with conceptualization. Rather, while conceptualization should play an important role in any argumentation theoretical approach, argumentation theories focus on arguments based on propositional logic and argument structures, which are not sufficient for arguing about domain conceptualization, which requires a more fine-grained logical analysis. In this paper we will explain why conceptualization plays an important role within argumentation and why argumentation support tools, especially if they use Natural Language Processing (NLP), can help in creating domain ontologies.