Dana's Ph.D Thesis Published

Dana's Ph.D Thesis Published

Today Dana’s Ph.D Theisis entitled “Visualisation techniques to facilitate argument exploration” was published to the Napier research archive. This is the abstract:

Visualisation is a graphical representation that is used to aid understanding and gain insight into information. Similarly, visualising arguments can help people to explore argument structure and comprehend knowledge associated with tough problems.

In this thesis, we focus on representing arguments, especially when data size increase, which causes difficulty in exploring and understanding arguments. A fundamental problem from an argument perspective is that understanding argument requires users to understand the overview, read the content of arguments, and recognise how the arguments support, compete, and conflict with each other. Applying information visualisation techniques or combination between them in an argumentation domain can improve the navigation and exploration in argument data.

The main contribution of this thesis is proposing various visualisation approaches for gaining insights on argument data and helping experts to understand arguments. Based on collected user requirements, the work presents several prototypes that provide an overview of arguments while giving users the ability to read the argument text. To compare and evaluate our proposed techniques and tools, a controlled user study and interviews with argument experts are conducted. The collected qualitative and quantitative results are thoroughly analysed using relevant statistical tests.

@phdthesis {
title = {Visualisation techniques to facilitate argument exploration},
publicationstatus = {Unpublished},
url = {http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2694675},
keyword = {visualisation, argument, argument data, user understanding},
author = {Khartabil, Dana},
abstract = {Visualisation is a graphical representation that is used to aid understanding and gain insight into information. Similarly, visualising arguments can help people to explore argument structure and comprehend knowledge associated with tough problems.
In this thesis, we focus on representing arguments, especially when data size increase, which causes difficulty in exploring and understanding arguments. A fundamental problem from an argument perspective is that understanding argument requires users to understand the overview, read the content of arguments, and recognise how the arguments support, compete, and conflict with each other. Applying information visualisation techniques or combination between them in an argumentation domain can improve the navigation and exploration in argument data.
The main contribution of this thesis is proposing various visualisation approaches for gaining insights on argument data and helping experts to understand arguments. Based on collected user requirements, the work presents several prototypes that provide an overview of arguments while giving users the ability to read the argument text. To compare and evaluate our proposed techniques and tools, a controlled user study and interviews with argument experts are conducted. The collected qualitative and quantitative results are thoroughly analysed using relevant statistical tests.},
}