ART-AI Seminar
We are pleased to have Antonis Kakas, professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Cyprus, join us for this ART-AI Seminar. This will be taking place on the 17th March 2026, 10.15am-11.15am (GMT) in room 3WN 3.8. If you would like to join this seminar on Teams, please e-mail [email protected]
Abstract
Currently, there is a wide and intense interest in endowing and improving LLMs with reasoning capabilities. LLM-COGNICA offers an approach to do so based on the integration of the Natural Language capabilities of LLMs with Argumentation-based Reasoning. In this approach, instead of the LLM carrying out the reasoning, this is delegated to COGNICA, a Cognitive Argumentation system, which carries out the reasoning within a Controlled Natural Language. Specifically, LLM-COGNICA is a hybrid neural symbolic framework for reasoning under a decision policy specified within Natural Language and executed via Explainable Argumentation. This offers the reliability of formal problem solving and allows the human developer and problem solver to be in control of the system development process. The talk will present the LLM-COGNICA framework and its central element of mapping a decision policy in Natural Language to a corresponding policy in a formal symbolic form, within which argumentation-based reasoning captures the natural language policy reasoning. It will also present various evaluation and comparison experiments of the reasoning of LLM-COGNICA in relation to using LLMs alone and how LLM-COGNICA can be employed to build reliable real-life application systems.
Bio
Antonis C. Kakas is a professor (emeritus) at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Cyprus. He studied Mathematics at Imperial College, London and then obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the same college in 1984. His interest in Computing and AI started in 1989 under the group of Professor R.A. Kowalski. Since then, his research has concentrated on computational logic in AI with particular interest in argumentation, abduction and induction and their application to machine learning and cognitive systems. He has co-developed at the UCY several research AI systems, including the argumentation system of GORGIAS which has been applied to a wide range of problems in multi-agent systems and cognitive agents. With others he has proposed, Argumentation Logic, as a logic that offers a foundation for Human-centric and Explainable AI. With his students and collaborators, he is developing two new systems, LLM-COGNICA and ArgEML, to support the development of Cognitive Agentic AI and Explainable Machine Learning. He has recently co-founded a start-up company in Paris, called Argument Theory, which offers solutions to real- life application decision taking problems based on its rAIson platform of ΑΙ argumentation technology.
