Our goal is to provide interaction opportunities for local researchers who share an interest in theories of argumentation and their extension to multimedia presentations in computer media, whether designed by humans or intelligent systems. We invite Pittsburgh researchers interested in principles of effective communication from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to HCI, Computer-Aided Instruction, Rhetoric, Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, and Communication Design.

Some possible topics of interest are:

• effective organization of and interaction with on-line argument forms,
• effective media selection, i.e., how to determine which parts of an argument to express in which media (e.g., visually or via text),
• effective media coordination, i.e., how parts of the presentation in one medium contribute to parts expressed in other media,
• user model: influence of the user's tasks, goals, and/or abilities,
• approaches to research in this area: analysis of examples from print media and human-human interaction, experimentation, and computational cognitive modeling.

• reading and discussing papers on topics of interest,
• sharing information, e.g., contributing to an on-line bibliography,
• discussion of examples of particularly effective multimedia presentations, and/or
• informal presentations on the participants' research.

In this informal talk, I will describe some aspects of my dissertation research, focusing primarily on the application and extension of Toulmin's argument model to representing different kinds of arguments in scientific debate. The context for this work was an experiment in which students analyzed texts containing scientific arguments using a graphical interface. Students received instruction on describing and arguing for and against causal theories. In one condition students used a predefined representation based on the extended Toulmin model, in the other condition they developed their own representation. The efficacy of using vs. developing a representation was evaluated with respect to learning of the target instructional concepts and ease of coaching argument analysis.

Speaker Biography:
I received my B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering (Infrastructure Planning) from Stanford University in 1980. After a brief time in the transportation planning field I began moving towards computer science, obtaining an M.S. in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Stanford University in 1985. From 1985-1988, I was a member of the technical staff at DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, working on compilers and visual debugging. In 1988 I moved to Pittsburgh to start a doctoral program in the University of Pittsburgh's Intelligent Systems Studies Program, working in the area of tutoring systems for logic proofs (with Drs. Richard Scheines, Wilfried Sieg and Jonathan Pressler in the CMU Philosophy Department) and argumentation, under the supervision of Dr. Alan Lesgold, at LRDC. I completed my Ph.D. in 1998. Since 1994, I have also been a full time research programmer at the Center for Machine Translation/Language Technologies Institute at CMU, working on machine translation for French and Italian and on a variety of tools for supporting the machine translation process.

(Members who wish to be added to this list or who have other information to be added to this web site can send their information to Nancy.Green@cs.cmu.edu)