PADUA: Protocol for Arguing from experience Using Association rules.

PADUA : Research Abstract!!!!

PADUA, a protocol designed to enable agents to debate an issue drawing arguments not from a knowledge base of facts, rules and priorities but directly from a dataset of records of instances in the domain. This is particularly suited to applications which have large, possibly noisy, datasets, for which knowledge engineering would be difficult. Direct use of data requires a different style of argument, which has many affinities to case based reasoning. Following motivation and a discussion of the requirement of this form of reasoning. Here an application to enable the PADUA process between two players (agents) is provided to download. For more details about PADUA please refer to the following papers: Comma08, JURIX08, Ecsqaru07and AI07. This page provides an implemented system which takes the form of a dialogue game and embodies the PADUA protocol. The objective of the implementation presented here is to provide a proof of concept for PADUA, and to enable empirical investigation of the efficacy of the protocol. A more detailed description of the implemented system, as well as the accompanying design documentation, can be found here.

PADUA has been implemented in the form of a Java program: a brief description of how the system functions is also given. The software implements the protocol so that dialogues between two players can be undertaken with each player taking turns to propose and attack positions by uttering PADUA speech acts. The GUI interface enables the user to import a game dictionary, which is a brief schema describing the problem domain, a description of this schema can be found in Appendix A. The user can then choose the background dataset for each of the two players, and a case to argue about. The user has the option to change the support/confidence values for both players, and any other strategy parameters via a special window (these parameters are described in the following section). A dialogue game then takes place between the two players and the results of this game, together with the actual dialogue, are printed to a special tab screen. The proponent starts the dialogue by proposing a new rule. If the proponent fails to propose a new rule, the “Dialogue Game Facilitator” checks the dialogue game style. In the case of “disputes”, the facilitator gives the turn to the opponent. If the opponent also fails to generate any rules, the game terminates. In the case of “dissents” the game terminates with a failure. This failure can be avoided by setting up the values of the support/confidence to match the domain under consideration, so that mining an initial AR is always guaranteed. Of course such pre-determination of the values requires a heuristic study of the domain prior to the start of the game. This may not always be feasible. A better solution will be to allow the “Player Agents” to dynamically change the values of the support/confidence thresholds if they failed to mine rules that match the case at the initial stage of the dialogue game, or to allow the user to try again with different settings for these parameters. Once the initial rule is proposed, a special repository called the “Game History” is updated with this move. “Game History” has a double functionality: firstly it keeps track of the moves placed by each participant, and makes sure that players are not reusing rules they have been proposed at a previous stage of the game. Secondly it provides a simple commitment store such that each player is committed to the consequences of its moves. The “Dialogue Game Facilitator” terminates the dialogue when the proponent fails to defend its position, or when the opponent fails to attack the proponent’s position. Once the game is terminated the dialogue game moves, along with the resulting classification, are printed to the output screen of the GUI application.

PADUA GUI Application Executable JAR File is Avaliable Here.

PADUA Java Source Files are Avaliable Here. (Requires NetBeans 6.5)

PADUA Test Data Sets are Avaliable Here.

How to Run the PADUA GUI Application

By simply downloading the JAR file and run it on your machine (this requires jdk1.6.0_11). Alternately you may download the source files (the java classes for this application are available in one zip file downloadable from the above list) and import them using NetBeans 6.5 (the name of the project should be PADUAInterface).

A number of datasets are available to test the application with, a zip files with these sets is downloadable from the above list. This file includes a number of folders with the datasets, such that ds_pro.num is the proponent share of the dataset ds, and ds_opp is the opponent's share. Each folder also contains a ds.gmd, which is the game dictionary file for the given dataset (ds). The user should upload this file and the players dataset using the PADUA GUI Application and run the game according to the explanation given in this web page (a simple user manual can be found here).