Gauvain Bourgne

Camilo Sarmiento, Gauvain Bourgne, Katsumi Inoue et al.

Although moral responsibility is not circumscribed by causality, they are both closely intermixed. Furthermore, rationally understanding the evolution of the physical world is inherently linked with the idea of causality. Thus, the decision-making applications based on automated planning inevitably have to deal with causality, especially if they consider imputability aspects or integrate references to ethical norms. The many debates around causation in the last decades have shown how complex this notion is and thus, how difficult is its integration with planning. As a result, much of the work in computational ethics relegates causality to the background, despite the considerations stated above. This paper's contribution is to provide a complete and sound translation into logic programming from an actual causation definition suitable for action languages, this definition is a formalisation of Wright's NESS test. The obtained logic program allows to deal with complex causal relations. In addition to enabling agents to reason about causality, this contribution specifically enables the computational ethics domain to handle situations that were previously out of reach. In a context where ethical considerations in decision-making are increasingly important, advances in computational ethics can greatly benefit the entire AI community.

Y. Munro, C. Sarmiento, I. Bloch et al.

In the context of abstract argumentation, we present the benefits of considering temporality, i.e. the order in which arguments are enunciated, as well as causality. We propose a formal method to rewrite the concepts of acyclic abstract argumentation frameworks into an action language, that allows us to model the evolution of the world, and to establish causal relationships between the enunciation of arguments and their consequences, whether direct or indirect. An Answer Set Programming implementation is also proposed, as well as perspectives towards explanations.

Yann Munro, Camilo Sarmiento, Isabelle Bloch et al.

An abstract argumentation framework is a commonly used formalism to provide a static representation of a dialogue. However, the order of enunciation of the arguments in an argumentative dialogue is very important and can affect the outcome of this dialogue. In this paper, we propose a new framework for modelling abstract argumentation graphs, a model that incorporates the order of enunciation of arguments. By taking this order into account, we have the means to deduce a unique outcome for each dialogue, called an extension. We also establish several properties, such as termination and correctness, and discuss two notions of completeness. In particular, we propose a modification of the previous transformation based on a "last enunciated last updated" strategy, which verifies the second form of completeness.

Evangelia Zve, Gauvain Bourgne, Benjamin Icard et al.

Outliers in dynamic topic modeling are typically treated as noise, yet we show that some can serve as early signals of emerging topics. We introduce a temporal taxonomy of news-document trajectories that defines how documents relate to topic formation over time. It distinguishes anticipatory outliers, which precede the topics they later join, from documents that either reinforce existing topics or remain isolated. By capturing these trajectories, the taxonomy links weak-signal detection with temporal topic modeling and clarifies how individual articles anticipate, initiate, or drift within evolving clusters. We implement it in a cumulative clustering setting using document embeddings from eleven state-of-the-art language models and evaluate it retrospectively on HydroNewsFr, a French news corpus on the hydrogen economy. Inter-model agreement reveals a small, high-consensus subset of anticipatory outliers, increasing confidence in these labels. Qualitative case studies further illustrate these trajectories through concrete topic developments.

Wachara Fungwacharakorn, Gauvain Bourgne, Ken Satoh

Precedential constraint is one foundation of case-based reasoning in AI and Law. It generally assumes that the underlying set of precedents must be consistent. To relax this assumption, a generalized notion of the reason model has been introduced. While several argumentative explanation approaches exist for reasoning with precedents based on the traditional consistent reason model, there has been no corresponding argumentative explanation method developed for this generalized reasoning framework accommodating inconsistent precedents. To address this question, this paper examines an extension of the derivation state argumentation framework (DSA-framework) to explain the reasoning according to the generalized notion of the reason model.