Drug debates normally proceed without scrutiny of why the particular issues being debated are considered the crucial issues. One plausible influence on the terms of debates is the interest groups involved. Four drug debates are addressed in this paper: neuroleptics, drugs in sport, analgesics and marijuana. The key interest groups and their likely influence on the terms of debates are examined....

This  study  investigated  the  effect  of  language  complexity  and  group  size  on  knowledge construction in two online debates. Knowledge construction was assessed using Gunawardena et al.’s Interaction Analysis Model (1997). Language complexity was determined by dividing the  number  of  unique  words  by  total  words.  It  refers  to  the  lexical  variation.  The  results showed  that...

Two players hold contradicting positions regarding a given issue, which depends on a (fixed) number of aspects or criteria they both know. Suppose, as a third-party, that you want to make a decision based on what will report the players. Unfortunately, what the players can communicate is limited. How should you design the rules of your protocol so as to minimize the mistakes induced by these co...

An axiomatic modeling approach to multi-issue debates is proposed. A debate is viewed as a decision procedure consisting of two stages: (1) an “argumentation rule” determines what arguments are admissible for each party, given the “raw data”, depending on the issue or set of issues under discussion; (2) a “persuasion rule” determines the strength of the admissible arguments and selects the winn...

Debate summarization is one of the novel and challenging research areas in automatic text summarization which has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we develop a debate summarization pipeline to summarize key topics which are discussed or argued in the two opposing sides of online debates. We view that the generation of debate summaries can be achieved by clustering, cluster labeling, and ...