Generating Discourse-Based Explanations

Humans and artificial agents need to be able to explain themselves to one another. They need to be able to present their perspectives and assess the views of others. This paper describes an approach to explanation aware reasoning, using underlying structures of natural discourse and argumentation theory. By positioning argumentation, explanation, and defeasibility concepts as first-class ontological entities, we can create an explanation-aware solution for multi-agent environments. Arguments are linked using ontologically specified interactions, such as substantiation, rebuttal, and accrual. It is envisioned that communities of human and artificial agents will engage in collaborative explanatory argumentation using argumentative structures and interactions for discovering knowledge and managing and navigating conflict and agreement.