A First Approach Towards Integrating Twitter and Defeasible Argumentation

Abstract

Social networks have grown exponentially in use and impact on the society as a whole. In particular, microblogging platforms such as Twitter have become important tools to assess public opinion on different issues. Recently, some approaches for assessing Twitter messages have been developed. However, such approaches have an important lim- itation, as they do not take into account contradictory and potentially inconsistent information which might emerge from relevant messages. We contend that the information made available in Twitter can be useful for modelling arguments which emerge bottom-up from the social interaction associated with such messages, thus enabling an integration between Twitter and defeasible argumentation. In this paper, we outline the main elements characterizing this integration, identifying “opinions” associated with particular hashtags, obtaining as well other alternative counter-opinions. As a result, we will be able to obtain an “opinion tree”, rooted in the first original query, in a similar way as done with dialectical trees in argumentation.