Can an AI Analyze Arguments? Argument-Checking and the Challenges of Assessing the Quality of Online Information

In this chapter, we present and discuss an ongoing project to develop a glass-box AI engine called KRINO – from Greek, to judge, criticize, reason – capable of parsing written text on the discourse level and analyzing the arguments thereby contained. KRINO is designed to assist users with argument-checking, i.e., the process of evaluating the quality of arguments. We describe the set-up and basic characteristics of KRINO and explain how it can assist human annotators in a project undertaken by the Dutch organization Internet Society Netherlands Make Media Great Again Working Group (shortened MMGA) that is aimed at improving the quality of online information in settings varying from online news outlets to social media. The joint project is motivated by the challenges posed by online information and the need to empower internet users to better analyze its contents. We explain the prospects and challenges of combining the KRINO and MMGA projects on argument-checking and discuss the societal and computational relevance of this project.