Monday, November 8, 2021

CfP: Argumentation on the Web


The Journal of Web Semantics invites submissions for a special issue on Argumentation on the Web, to be edited by Antonis Bikakis, Giorgos Flouris, Dimitris Plexousakis, Nico Potyka and Steffen Staab.

Submissions are due by 1st June 2022.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in applying argumentation technology in web applications, leading to several active areas of research. One such area is the use of argumentation technology to explain the decisions of black-box models. Typical web applications are explanations for services like product recommendation or review aggregation. Another area of increasing interest is argumentation mining, where the goal is to automatically extract and analyse arguments from natural language documents. Typical web applications are the automatic analysis of online discussions and a more fine-grained analysis of online reviews based on argumentative structure. Argumentation technology is also potentially interesting to make dialogue systems on the web more engaging. Finally, representations of arguments on the Web and in knowledge graphs, argumentative relationships in and among documents or data may pave the way for novel applications representing citizen or scientific dialogue.

We invite articles with novel applications of argumentation on the web, new algorithms and concepts or novel results that improve the understanding of existing approaches in this context. Topics include but are not limited to:

  • applications and case-studies of argumentation technology on the web

  • argument mining

  • argumentation-based explanation

  • argumentation knowledge graphs

  • argumentation in multi-agent systems

  • computational persuasion

  • dialogical argumentation

  • evaluating the strength of arguments

  • generating web arguments

  • managing web arguments

  • novel argumentation formalisms or semantics (with emphasis on those suitable for use in the web)

  • representing web arguments

  • representing uncertainty about arguments

  • system descriptions and user studies

  • visualization of arguments

Guest Editors

Antonis Bikakis is an associate professor in the Department of Information Studies of University College London. His research interests are in knowledge representation, nonmonotonic reasoning, computational argumentation and multi-agent systems and in the development of knowledge-based systems for intelligent environments and the Web.  

Giorgos Flouris is a Principal Researcher (Grade B) at FORTH-ICS. His research interests lie mainly in the areas of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Belief Revision, Computational Argumentation, and the Semantic Web. He is currently the coordinator of the Symbolic AI Group (SymbAI) of the Information Systems Laboratory of FORTH-ICS.

Dimitris Plexousakis is a Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete. He is also the Director of the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas and the Head of the Information Systems Laboratory.  His research interests are in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Cognitive Robotics and the Semantic Web.

Nico Potyka is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Stuttgart. His research focuses on explainable approaches to artificial intelligence, including probabilistic logical reasoning, weighted and probabilistic approaches to computational argumentation and knowledge graphs.

Steffen Staab is professor at University of Stuttgart and University of Southampton. His research focuses on knowledge graphs, machine learning and HCI. He is particularly interested in human and machine reflection on intelligent systems. 


Confirmed Review Committee

  • Pietro Baroni, University of Brescia, Italy
  • AnneMarie Borg, Utrecht University, NL
  • Katarzyna Budzynska, University of Dundee, UK
  • Elena Cabrio, Univ. Nice, FR
  • Martin Caminada, Cardiff University, UK
  • Philipp Cimiano, Univ Bielefeld, DE
  • Andrea Cohen, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina
  • Sarah Alice Gaggl, TU Dresden, DE
  • Massimiliano Giacomin, University of Brescia, Italy
  • Guido Governatori, NICTA Queensland, AUS
  • Siegfried Handschuh, St. Gallen, CH
  • Anthony Hunter, University College London, UK
  • Joao Leite, Univ Nova de Lisboa, PT
  • Jean-Guy Mailly,  Paris University, FR
  • Sylwia Polberg, Cardiff University, UK
  • Antonio Rago, Imperial College London, UK
  • Chris Reed, University of Dundee, UK
  • Tjitze Rienstra, University of Maastricht, NL
  • Jodi Schneider, University of Illinois, USA
  • Guillermo Simari,  Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina
  • Matthias Thimm, University of Hagen, DE
  • Serena Villata, CNRS, FR
  • Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK

Important dates

  • Call for papers: November 8, 2021
  • Submission deadline: June 1, 2022
  • Author notification: September 1, 2022
  • Revisions due: October 15, 2022
  • Final Versions: December 1, 2022
  • Publication: Q2, 2023

Submission guidelines

The Journal of Web Semantics solicits original scientific contributions of high quality. Following the overall mission of the journal, we emphasize the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications. The publication of large-scale experiments and their analysis is also encouraged to clearly illustrate scenarios and methods that introduce semantics into existing Web interfaces, contents and services.


Submission of your manuscript is welcome provided that it, or any translation of it, has not been copyrighted or published and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts should be prepared for publication in accordance with instructions given in the JWS guide for authors. The submission and review process will be carried out using Elsevier's Web-based Editorial Manager (EM) system. Please state the name of the SI in your cover letter and, at the time of submission, please select “VSI: ArgWeb” when reaching the Article Type selection.


Upon acceptance of an article, the author(s) will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the publisher. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. Elsevier's liberal preprint policy permits authors and their institutions to host preprints on their web sites. Preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible via JWS First Look. Final copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at Elsevier's archival online server.