Abstract

This paper is intended to honour the memory of Douglas Walton (1942--2020), a Canadian philosopher of argumentation who died in January 2020. Walton's contributions to argumentation theory have had a very strong influence on Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in the design of autonomous software agents able to reason and argue with one another, and in the design of protocols to govern such interactions. In this paper, we explore two of these contributions --- argumentation schemes and dialogue protocols --- by discussing how they may be applied to a pressing current research challenge in AI: the automated assessment of explanations for automated decision-making systems.