Scottish Argumentation Day 2026 took place on the 29th of May at the University of Dundee. SAD 2026 was organised by Eimear Maguire, Kamila Górska, and Ramon Ruiz-Dolz, and we were delighted to welcome 22 participants representing 8 academic institutions across Scotland and beyond, and an industry visitor. Many thanks to everyone who made it such a successful event by presenting, attending, and engaging. The day showcased a wide range of work on argumentation, and featured plenty of discussion over coffees, lunch and posters.
After a welcome from the organisers, the day began with a keynote by Dr Elena Musi from the University of Liverpool. This introduced us to a range of Dr Musi’s work exploring misinformation generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) from both theoretical and applied argumentation perspectives. A further talk on LLM reasoning completed the first session.
The second session’s keynote was provided by Prof. Dr. Henning Wachsmuth of the University of Hannover, arguing in favour of the need for argumentative LLMs and presenting research working toward this direction. This was followed by talks on the robustness of argument mining models, and on preference-based reductions of argumentation frameworks.
Dr Mark Snaith from Robert Gordon University gave the third session’s keynote, discussing the complementary perspectives provided by classic dialogue modelling and LLMs for developing high-quality interactive agents. This was complemented by further talks on thesis plans for developing heterogeneous multi-agents, and work on visualising dialogue dynamics.
The final presentation session showed how broad argumentation research can be, with one talk exploring categories of argumentative discourse relations across disciplines, and one investigating what summarisation metrics actually capture about a summary, in terms of faithfulness versus coverage of the original material. A lively poster session rounded out the day, with a range of work that varied from participant-based studies to automatic classification experiments. Participants with time to spare before their journey home continued the conversation with a well-earned drink and dinner together. Another massive thank you to everyone who made this event such a success! Thank you to SICSA for sponsoring, and we hope to see everyone again next year!
