Antonio Rago

Abstract: hide the reasoning behind these opinions. Argumentation, as understood in AI, can be used to evaluate opinions in dialectical exchanges, transparently articulating the reasoning behind the opinions. We aim to give a method integrating argumentation within opinion polling to make significant steps forward from conventional opinion polling. Our proposed opinion polling method has two main objectives which we predict will give it advantages over the flat, conventional approach which is almost universally adopted. The first is to increase the engagement of users within the political process, an area which seems to be lacking of late. This will be done by forcing the users to consider, and potentially share in a structured manner, their reasoning when responding to the poll. The second is to improve the quality and the quantity of data which opinion polls provide for researchers, namely by: including reasoning from users, offering differing measures of strength based on reasoning and introducing the ability to require logical conventions to be followed to highlight illogical/random voting or otherwise, all of which take advantage of the dialectical relationships within argumentation frameworks.