RAIL

Argument and Computation – special issue on Argumentation for Consumers of Healthcare

Abstracts due May 15, 2012
Full papers due September 1, 2012.

Topics include but are not limited to computationally-oriented treatments of:

• Theories of argumentation for health system design,
• Persuasion for health-behavior change or health management,
• Negotiation with patients about treatment regimens,
• Lay-oriented justification of diagnosis or proposed medical interventions,
• Effective risk communication and meeting other patient education needs via argumentation,
• Argument source attributes, e.g., establishing credibility and trust,
• Argument medium attributes, e.g., engagement and immediacy through interaction with conversational agents or multimodal systems,
• User modeling, i.e., leveraging computational models of the message recipient’s (initial or evolving) attitudes for content selection and presentation design,
• Assistance for consumers in finding and evaluating evidence, possibly conflicting, in the medical literature or with respect to direct-to-consumer medical advertisements,
• Tools for training health professionals in argumentation theory and practice,
• Argumentation-theory based tools for training patients and consumers in critical thinking.

For more information see call for papers for special issue on
the journal’s web site:  http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tarc