Microdebates App for Android: A tool for participating in argumentative online debates using a handheld device

Abstract

Microdebates App for Android is a part of a research effort aimed to propose better ways of exchanging ideas and opinions in online communities. With it, a user can argue from a handheld device, using Twitter. One can also visualize opinions of other microdebaters, explore ongoing debates, and see where the consensus is. Under the hood, Microdebates uses computational argumentation to rank opinions and drive the visualization. The result is a visual summary of the debate that takes into account semantic information such as explicit attack relations that link opinions together. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application that brings computational argumentation to handheld devices. We describe the application and its logic, and discuss results from an empirical study.