A defeasible reasoning framework for human mental workload representation and assessment

Human mental workload (MWL) has gained importance in the last few decades as an important design concept. It is a multifaceted complex construct mainly applied in cognitive sciences and has been defined in many different ways. Although measuring MWL has potential advantages in interaction and interface design, its formalisation as an operational and computational construct has not sufficiently been addressed. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing an extensible framework built upon defeasible reasoning, and implemented with argumentation theory (AT), in which MWL can be better defined, measured, analysed, explained and applied in different human–computer interactive contexts. User studies have demonstrated how a particular instance of this framework outperformed state-of-the-art subjective MWL assessment techniques in terms of sensitivity, diagnosticity and validity. This in turn encourages further application of defeasible AT for enhancing the representation of MWL and improving the quality of its assessment.     

An Infrastructure for Argumentative Agents

Multiagent systems are suitable for providing a framework that allows agents to perform collaborative processes in a social context. Furthermore, argumentation is a natural way of reaching agreements between several parties. However, it is difficult to find infrastructures of argumentation offering support for agent societies and their social context. Offering support for agent societies allows representation of more realistic environments to have argumentation dialogues. We propose an infrastructure to develop and execute argumentative agents in an open multiagent system. It offers tools to develop agents with argumentation capabilities. It also offers support for agent societies and their social context. The infrastructure is publicly available. Also, it has been implemented in an application scenario where argumentative agents try to reach an agreement about the best solution to solve a problem reported to the system.     

Argumentation-enabled interest-based personalised recommender system

Recommender systems (RSs) use information filtering to recommend information of interest (to a user). Similarly, personalisation can be adopted for recommendations in e-market. We propose a new and innovative system called as interest-based recommender system (IBRS) for personalisation of recommendations. The IBRS is an agent-based RS that takes into account user's preferences. It can transform a standard product (or service) into a dedicated solution for an individual. The system discovers interesting product alternatives based on user's underlying mental attitudes (likes and dislikes) during the repair process using argumentation. The proposed method combines a hybrid RS approach with automated argumentation-based reasoning between agents. The system improves results by improving the recommendation repair activity. We consider a book recommendation application, for experiment to carry out the system's (objective and subjective) evaluation using standard metrics. The experiments confirm that the proposed IBRS improves user's acceptance of the product as compared with a traditional hybrid method and an argumentation-enabled state-of-the-art recommendation method. The system has been found to be more effective than its traditional counterpart when dealing with the new user problems.     

Detecting logical argumentation in text via communicative discourse tree

We solve the argument mining problem by investigating discourse and communicative text structure. A new formal graph-based structure called communicative discourse tree (CDT) is defined. It consists of a discourse tree with additional labels on edges, which stand for verbs. These verbs represent communicative actions. Discourse trees are based on rhetoric relations, extracted from a text according to Rhetoric Structure Theory. The problem is tackled as a binary classification task, where the positive class corresponds to texts with arguments and the negative class corresponds to texts with no arguments. The feature engineering for the classification task is conducted, deciding on which syntactic and discourse features are associated with logical argumentation. Text classification framework based on syntactic, discourse and communicative discourse text structures with a number of learning approaches is implemented. Evaluation on a combined data-set is provided.     

一种新的辩论推理模式及其应用

文中定义了一个新的辩论推理模式,建立了一个形式化的知识表示框架,并把它应用于研究扩展逻辑程序类的说明语义,结果表明,新语义克服了择优语义的不足。作者还根据上述研究结果实现了逻辑程序设计风格下的知识框架。     

LPG装卸码头现场监控拖轮的爆炸风险分析

按照有关规定，液化气船在卸货作业期间需要消防拖轮进行监护。本文对这种作业方式进行了安全分析，研究表明，一旦液化石油气船在装卸期间发生泄漏，形成的重气云团在极短的时间之内就会扩散至消防拖轮，而且此时消防拖轮处石油气的浓度远大于1．85％的爆炸下限，而消防拖轮本身又不防爆，所以极有可能引发爆炸。本文针对研究结果提出了相应的风险减缓措施，也为今后颁发类似的通知提供了参考和依据。     

城市供水工程取水规模合理性分析

以广州北江取水工程水资源论证为例,通过需水预测成果复核和引用、现状和规划供水工程的调查以及供水范围供需平衡分析,论证供水工程取水规模的合理性,探讨供水项目取水规模的合理性分析要点和论证思路。     

航天体系辅助决策仿真系统的功能设计与实现

为了提高航天体系规划论证的科学性,把规划论证过程划分为需求分析、体系结构设计、多方案选优、方案优化、作战评估、进度安排6个阶段,据此提出了航天体系辅助决策仿真系统应具备体系结构建模功能、体系结构分析功能、综合评价功能、作战仿真功能、阶段部署优化5种功能。设计了支撑层、建模仿真层、任务层三层结构的仿真系统总体框架,给出了各仿真模块的实现方式。航天体系辅助决策仿真系统具有功能系统完善、结构简单、实用性强等特点,较好地满足了航天体系规划论证的需要。     

Learning with video‐based examples – Are you sure you do not need help?

This study investigated help‐seeking activities in a computer‐based environment teaching argumentative skills by videos of argumentative dialogues of teachers who discussed controversy issues in the context of a workshop. Learners, all of them students of educational sciences, solved learning tasks on the presented argumentative dialogues and reflected on their response certitude. Forty‐three students voluntary took part in the study. Two experimental groups varied according to the type of task they solved. Group 1 got adjunct questions, so‐called self‐explanation prompts that elicited elaboration of the video content. Group 2 answered multiple‐choice tasks that assessed the same knowledge. After each task, participants of both groups (a) had to judge the certainty of their response being correct (i.e., the marking of the multiple‐choice task or the written self‐explanations) and (b) were offered to use the help function on demand. Results revealed the relevance of learners' response certitude with respect to their help use. Low response certitude about the correctness of a task solution led to higher help use which was positively related to learning outcome. However, learners' response certitude was unrelated to the actual correctness of their task solution. Type of task had no influence on response certitude, help use or learning outcome.     

下坂地导流泄洪洞洞线方案研究

下坂地工程是塔里木河流域近期综合治理中唯一的山区水库工程,枢纽建筑物由拦河坝、导流泄洪洞、引水发电洞和电站厂房四部分组成。文中介绍了下坂地水利枢纽导流泄洪洞工程洞线方案的设计论证,通过枢纽布置、技术设计、施工安排及技术经济等多方面综合论证和研究了不同洞线的方案确定问题。