Argumentation in the Intelligence Domain

Abstract

Aiming to explain past events or predict future events, intelligence analysts reason about collections of often unreliable, ambiguous and incomplete evidence to support or reject alternative hypotheses. Argumentation plays an important role in both the collaborative reasoning process within teams of analysts, and the final documents in which the outcomes of the analysis are reported. We explore the commonalities between standpoints and arguments on the one hand and hypotheses and evidence on the other.