Polarisation assessment in an intelligent argumentation system using fuzzy clustering algorithm for collaborative decision support

Abstract

We developed an on-line intelligent argumentation system which facilitates stakeholders in exchanging dialogues. It provides decision support by capturing stakeholders’ rationale through arguments. As part of the argumentation process, stakeholders tend to both polarise their opinions and form polarisation groups. The challenging issue of assessing argumentation polarisation had not been addressed in argumentation systems until recently. Arvapally, Liu, and Jiang [(2012), ‘Identification of Faction Groups and Leaders in Web-Based Intelligent Argumentation System for Collaborative Decision Support’, in Proceedings of International Conference on Collaborative Technologies and Systems] earlier developed a method to identify polarisation groups. These groups, however, tend to overlap to a certain degree; each stakeholder may be a member of multiple polarisation groups to varied degrees. Quantifying stakeholders’ membership in multiple polarisation groups is an important issue in the argumentation for collaborative decision-making, which is not addressed earlier. We present a novel approach using fuzzy clustering algorithm to address this issue in this article. The method is evaluated using data sets produced from the discussions of 24 stakeholders. Experimental results indicate that our method is effective for both identifying polarisation groups and quantifying stakeholders’ degree of membership in each polarisation group.

Keywords:

• polarisation assessment
• fuzzy c-means
• argumentation system
• collaborative decision support
• social computing
• knowledge discovery
• empirical investigations

Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciate the Intelligent Systems Center and National University Transportation Center at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla for supporting our project. We thank the students of Software Engineering class for participating in our experiments. We sincerely thank Ms. Elizabeth Roberson, English editor for helping us to edit this article.