An argumentation interface to facilitate human-machine collaboration in scientific research: A preliminary exploration

In today’s increasingly data- and AI-driven scientific research enterprise, the division of labor between computational methods development and usage poses great risks of misuse. Moreover, flaws in a method can be uncovered years after the method’s wide adoption, raising questions about how to share the information about uncovered flaws with new generations of users in a timely manner. We propose an argumentation interface to meet these challenges. Using a toy example of choosing methods for ranking players in a chess tournament, we demonstrate how argumentation frameworks—which will form a key component in our argumentation interface—can be used to organize arguments about the choice of method. We lay out our plan to use the case of two prominent community detection algorithms to determine whether AFs are equally applicable to organizing arguments about choosing methods for scientific research tasks.