PhD studentship positions

Posted by chris on July 27, 2023

In addition to advertising a permanent research position (see arg.tech/2023PDRA01) the Centre for Argument Technology is now also opening a call for applications for fully-funded PhD studentships.

We currently run a portfolio of research projects for government, charity and commercial funders in the UK, US, EU, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland worth over £1m per year and with many dependencies between these projects, we need people to join the team and help drive forward the research of the Centre. This is a unique opportunity for someone with interest and expertise in working with argumentation to join a world-leading research group – regardless of their disciplinary background. If you think you would be a good fit, we would be keen to hear from you regardless of whether you have a first degree in philosophy, linguistics, literature, communication, cognitive science, AI, mathematics, engineering, economics, international relations, law, or any other cognate disciplines.

Applications are invited across the full range of interdisciplinary research in the Centre, with more details available online.

Applications are accepted by sending cover letter and CV to jobs@arg.tech Closing date is 23 September 2023.

Permanent research vacancies

Posted by chris on July 11, 2023

ARG-tech is continuing to expand. We are looking both for candidates for PhD positions, and now also for postdoctoral research positions that are permanent subject to funding review after three years. We are looking both for junior candidates who have either just finished or are about to finish their PhD, and for more senior researchers with significant research experience (Grade 7 to Grade 8, £35,308 to £47,047).

We currently run a portfolio of research projects for government, charity and commercial funders in the UK, US, EU, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland worth over £1m per year and with many dependencies between these projects, we need people to join the team and help drive forward the research of the Centre. This is a unique opportunity for someone with interest and expertise in working with argumentation to join a world-leading research group – regardless of their disciplinary background. If you think you would be a good fit, we would be keen to hear from you regardless of whether you have degrees in philosophy, linguistics, literature, communication, cognitive science, AI, mathematics, engineering, economics, international relations, law, or any other cognate disciplines.

More details are available online, or contact the director of the Centre, Chris Reed, chris@arg.tech. Applications are accepted online until the deadline, 14 August 2023.

Reflections on an expanding ARG-tech

Posted by chris on March 31, 2023

We’re at the end of the first quarter of 2023 and apart from the usual ‘wow, where has the time gone?’ it’s also an opportunity to look at how the Centre has changed over the past few months. With current funding from IARPA, Dstl, AHRC, SNF, VW Stiftung, EMIF and H2020, we have been building the team and offering many welcomes in one form or another. Starting in January, Nicole Orr, who has been connected with ARG-tech since even before she started her undergraduate degree, embarked on her PhD with us. Later that month, Cameron Bryce came to us as an intern with a brief on DevOps, joining Zvony Delas and Idris Mahamdi, who between them have inaugurated our new Internship Programme. Less than a week later, Eimear Maguire came from Paris Cité to join us as a postdoc to work on computational pragmatics and models of discourse. The week after that, Godfrey Inyama fresh with his MSc from Heriot Watt, started as a PhD student working in deep learning models of dialogue. At the start of February, Suzanne Duce trekked all the way from the other side of campus to join us in helping to manage the increasing organisational workload across all of the various threads of research. Then technically on the same day, Ramon Ruiz Dolz from UPV in Valencia joined as a postdoc, but practicalities meant that it was not until today that he joins us physically in Dundee.

So it’s been a busy start to the year. But it’s exciting. The buzz in the air in our labs is palpable as work starts on several new initiatives; the vibrancy of the group is addictive. One of the things I love the most is the rapid identification of new and interesting problems and the small teams forming ad hoc to dig into them from the many disciplinary backgrounds represented here.

With this signficant uptick in the size of the team, we’re going to be able to start to tackle more and bigger problems, and to really accelerate on some of the deep challenges in argument technology. The rest of 2023 is going to be an exciting ride!

OVA3 released

Posted by chris on December 21, 2022

OVA3 is the latest release of the Online Visualisation of Argument analysis tool. OVA3 is thoroughly re-engineered for speed, stability and scalability and introduces collaborative editing, PDF annotation, utterance timestamps and a re-designed easy-to-use graphical interface. Like its predecessor (OVA2) it supports a wide variety of argumentation schemes and is also designed to handle both simple monological arguments and complex arguments situated in dialogue, as well as providing optional support for analysis using Inference Anchoring Theory.

OVA has tens of thousands of users and is a native Argument Web application, interfacing to annotation of millions of words across thousands of arguments through the underlying AIF representation used in a variety of AI applications including argument mining algorithms, automatic grading software and visual analytics that provide insight and summary.

OVA3 is released as free software and can be found online at ova.arg.tech with an accompanying user manual and further information.

The codebase is released under CC-BY-SA at github.com/arg-tech/OVA3

ARG-tech countering disinformation

Posted by chris on December 2, 2022

The annual event of the European Media and Information Fund, EMIF, coordinated by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute, marks the start of our project on fact-checking beyond the facts: leveraging argument technology for impartial fact-checking, in collaboration with our partners led by Elena Musia at the University of Liverpool, Andrea Nicolai at T3 Systems and Gianni Riotta at LUISS in Rome.

Somaye Moslemnejad joins ARG-tech

Posted by Brian Plüss on November 16, 2022

We welcome today Somaye Moslemnejad who joins us as a new PhD student to work on algorithms for argument mining. Somaye comes to us from Mashad in Iran where she worked on machine learning applications and uncertainty, and she’ll be building on our work in deep learning and neurosymbolic argument mining.

Argument mining for Earnings Conference Calls

Posted by Brian Plüss on

We are excited to be getting down to work today on a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation lead by Andrea Rocci at USI in Lugano.

We are going to be working on the argumentation dynamics in Earnings Conference Calls, a rich source of subtle and high-impact argument in the financial domain. With a particular focus on the ways that questions generate argumentative structures, the research builds on recent work that has established methodology, coupled with recent results in argument mining. It’s going to be fun!

Four New Positions in AI and Argument Technology

Posted by Brian Plüss on October 25, 2022

The Centre for Argument Technology has secured several new research funding successes in the areas of enhancing participatory democracy, protecting privacy, countering disinformation and supporting the work of the intelligence community. As a result we currently have four new vacancies:

– A Research Project Manager at Grade 7 or 8 (£34,308 to £51,805 + 21% superannuation), depending on experience. This position is open to candidates with a PhD in *any* field (www.arg.tech/2022PDRA05).

– A Postdoctoral Research Associate in computational models of dialogue at Grade 7 (£34,308 to £42,155 + 21% superannuation; www.arg.tech/2022PDRA04).

– Two PhD studentships open to candidates from anywhere in the world with full scholarship plus stipend (www.arg.tech/2022PHD04) in argument analysis, mining, representation, navigation, manipulation and visualisation.

Closing date for all positions is 20 November 2022. Details on how to apply can be found at arg.tech/vacancies. Enquiries should be addressed to the director of the Centre, Prof. Chris Reed at chris@arg.tech.

ARG-tech secures $2.5m in funding

Posted by Brian Plüss on October 24, 2022

A multi-million-dollar project to protect a person’s online identity is enlisting help from ARG-tech to develop software capable of detecting and disguising trademark linguistic patterns used by individuals online.

ARG-tech are receiving $2.5m of funding as part of a larger project consortium led by SRI International in California. The project is funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the United States Government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Dundee research forms part of IARPA’s Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program, a research effort aimed at advancing human language technology. The goals of the initiative are to help protect the identities of authors who could be endangered for speaking out, as well as developing means of identifying counterintelligence risks.

ARG-tech will utilise dialogical fingerprinting throughout the project: cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology processing dialogue models dating back centuries to develop a complete understanding of linguistic patterns.

A full Press Release is available at http://arg.tech/signature-pr.

Welcoming Nicole and Ella

Posted by Brian Plüss on August 24, 2022

This month we are delighted to welcome Nicole Orr and Ella Schad as members of the group.

Nicole graduated from the Computing programme at Dundee, and has been working as annotator and sometime developer in the group since just before she started her undergraduate degree. She joins us as a Research Software Engineer working on a number of our annotation tools and the infrastructure that supports them.

Ella has been working as a part of our annotation pool for over a year, and joins us to start a PhD in linguistic models of argumentation, in which she will also be working on aspects of theory development and methodology.