ArgServices: A Microservice-Based Architecture for Argumentation Machines

Argumentation is ubiquitous, and the development of argumentation machines could greatly assist humans in managing and navigating argumentation. However, the development of such systems is hindered by the lack of common standards and suitable tools, leading to ad-hoc solutions with little reuse value. Towards a more unified approach, we present an extensible microservice-based architecture for argumentation machines. Being built on the established gRPC framework, it provides strongly typed interfaces for the following services: (i) Argument Mining, (ii) Case-Based Reasoning on Arguments, (iii) Argument Retrieval and Ranking, and (iv) Quality Assessment of Arguments. Our system is designed to be extensible, allowing for easy integration of new tasks. We demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture via a proof-of-concept implementation and provide additional supplementary resources, such as a REST API gateway. Our contributions are publicly available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.