Overview
The 7th Summer School on Argumentation: Connecting Argumentation (SSA 2026) will take place from 9–13 September 2026 (holiday on the 11th) at the CSIC Delegación de Catalunya and the Residència d'Investigadors in Barcelona, Spain. The school is co-located with the 11th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2026).
It is the seventh event in the series of Summer Schools on Argumentation. Previous editions took place in Dundee, Scotland (2014), Potsdam, Germany (2016), Warsaw, Poland (2018), Perugia, Italy (2020), Cardiff, Wales (2022), and Hagen, Germany (2024).
The main aim of SSA 2026 is to provide attendees with a solid foundation in the basics of formal argumentation as well as insights into applying formal argumentation and connections with other approaches in AI.
The school welcomes both students and researchers in different fields not limited to argumentation, including e.g. non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, logic programming, linguistics, natural language processing, philosophy, and psychology, just to mention a few of them.
The program will include courses, a doctoral consortium and a student session organized by OHAAI. The doctoral consortium is a mentoring program bringing together PhD students and senior researchers in formal argumentation. Moreover, participants are encouraged to join the student program co-organized by OHAAI.
Invited Speakers
The following speakers will give tutorials at the Summer School- Srdjan Vesic, CNRS, France
- Sanjay Modgil, King's College London, United Kingdom
- Isabelle Kuhlmann, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
- Sylwia Polberg-Riener, Cardiff University, United Kingdom - TU Wien, Austria
- Johannes Peter Wallner, Technische Universität Graz, Austria
- Maria Vanina Martinez, IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain
- Jean-Guy Mailly, Université Toulouse Capitole, France
Registration
Registration for the Summer School is possible as part of the COMMA 2026 Registration . See the SSA Registration page for details.
Doctoral Consortium
The Summer School on Argumentation 2026 will host a Doctoral Consortium (DC) in collaboration with OHAAI. To participate, students will need to submit an extended abstract of their PhD project (see details below).
The aims of the consortium are:
- to promote contact among PhD students and more senior researchers;
- to support students with information and advice on academic, research, and industrial careers;
- to give students the opportunity to present and publish their work;
- to give students the space to discuss the latest argumentation developments.
The DC consists of the OHAAI session and informal meetings between PhD students and senior researchers, planned at their own convenience. PhD-students who have a specific research proposal and/or preliminary research results are invited to participate in the DC.
OHAAI Session
The Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI (OHAAI) is a collection of selected peer-reviewed papers, in the form of extended abstracts, summarising ongoing PhD research on Argumentation in AI, published annually as an online Open Access handbook.
The OHAAI-session is designed for students to showcase their work on argumentation via posters and engage in a vibrant discussion on the latest advances and trends from the most recent OHAAI volume. Participants will first deliver a brief presentation on their posters, followed by a more detailed poster session. Topics can range from overviews of recent publications, initial research findings, thesis summaries, or a project open for discussion.
The submitted extended abstracts will be published in the upcoming OHAAI Volume 6.
Application Process
Application is through abstract submission.
Interested students can submit their work in the form of an extended research abstract, giving an overview of their PhD research agenda and how it relates to the field of argumentation via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ohaaivol6.
Submissions must not exceed 4 pages (plus references and acknowledgements) and they need to be submitted in PDF, following the LaTeX or MS Word templates provided on the OHAAI website.
Deadline: 2 August 2026, 11:59pm AoE
Students who do not wish to participate in the 1-to-1 meetings with senior researchers should send an email to editors@ohaai.co.uk, indicating their preference to opt out.
We recommend students register for the summer school before the DC acceptance notification.
Program
The program can be found on the SSA Program page.
Contact
For questions and comments to the organizers please contact the SSA organizers: Anna Rapberger and Jesse Heyninck.