Resolving Open-textured Rules with Templated Interpretive Arguments
This work addresses how structured argumentation affects human interpretation of ambiguous rules, with potential applications in AI reasoning systems.
The researchers investigated how restricting interpretive arguments to predefined templates affects people's reasoning about open-textured rules, using the Aporia game framework in an empirical study. They analyzed the resulting dataset to derive practical implications for developing interpretation-capable AI reasoners.
Open-textured terms in written rules are typically settled through interpretive argumentation. Ongoing work has attempted to catalogue the schemes used in such interpretive argumentation. But how can the use of these schemes affect the way in which people actually use and reason over the proper interpretations of open-textured terms? Using the interpretive argument-eliciting game Aporia as our framework, we carried out an empirical study to answer this question. Differing from previous work, we did not allow participants to argue for interpretations arbitrarily, but to only use arguments that fit with a given set of interpretive argument templates. Finally, we analyze the results captured by this new dataset, specifically focusing on practical implications for the development of interpretation-capable artificial reasoners.