The Centre for Argument Technology is hiring two PhD students, one in deep learning for argument mining, and the other in linguistic modelling of argumentation.

The Centre offers a well-resourced, highly interdisciplinary environment that works from philosophy through linguistics to AI and software engineering to develop and deploy high-impact solutions in sectors as diverse as education, law, politics and media. For a short summary of ARG-tech’s work, see youtu.be/xqetI4fFu_Y

These positions are open to ALL candidates, regardless of nationality. The studentships cover all fees, and include a tax-free stipend at UKRI rates (currently £16,062 per annum).

Closing date 17 June 2022. Applications with cover letter, CV, and names and contact details for three referees by email to jobs@arg.tech.

More information is available online at www.arg.tech/PHD202203.

The Centre has just released two vacancies in the AI/NLP subfield of argument mining: one for a PhD studentship and the other for a four-year senior postdoctoral appointment.

We are looking for a talented postdoctoral researcher to join a project exploring the role of argument mining in understanding and supporting public engagement with political processes. This 48-month position is at Grade 8 (£42k-£50k).

We are also looking to hire a PhD student with an interest in natural language processing, with a Masters or a good Bachelors in an appropriate subject to work on argument mining in financial discourse. The studentship is for 48 months and covers UKRI stipend (£16k tax-free) and fees at UK student rates only (candidates who do not qualify for UK student fees will be liable for the difference).

More information for the postdoc can be found at arg.tech/SSEN0407 and for the studentship at arg.tech/PHD202201 or by emailing the director, Prof. Chris Reed, chris@arg.tech. Deadline for applications 4 March 2022.

We’re delighted to welcome Ray Becker who joins us as a Research Software Engineer. Ray comes to ARG-tech with a background in various types of statistical analysis of climate conditions and water management systems, and in machine learning algorithms for sentiment analysis. He has also worked on co-speech gestures, language comprehension, and event structure at universities in the US, Canada, and Germany, and joins us now to work on Argument Web infrastructure.

We’ve been working with Pindex on a new video that explains the context and motivation for a lot of work in argument technology. Stephen Fry narrates, opening with a discussion of some of the big societal challenges including conspiracy theories and fake news. The video then explores the role argument technology could play in tackling these challenges, covering foundational research in areas such as argument mining, plus some signal successes such as IBM’s Project Debater, and the vision of the Argument Web including practical applications such as Reason Checking.

The video is out now on youtube:

Many congratulations to Debela Gemechu who successfully passed his PhD viva today subject to minor corrections. His thesis, Argument Mining: Representation, contextualization and structuring was examined by Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych from UKP at Darmstadt and Prof. Stephen McKenna at Dundee. Debela is continuing to work with us as Industrial Fellow in Residence.

This week we welcome Kamila Gorska and Alex Marcoci to the group. Kamila joins us to study for a PhD in automated argument processing. Alex joins as a postdoc working on Trajectories of Conflict in the context of debate at the UN Security Council.

ARG-tech keeps growing!

Fantastic news that Noam Slonim and the IBM team have published their work on Project Debater in Nature today. Chris was invited to provide commentary in response, which appears in the same issue, coming out tomorrow.

Hot on the heels of the recent announcement that we’ve secured AHRC-DFG funding to work with the UN Security Council tracking ‘Trajectories of Conflict’ we’ve just learnt that our four year programme to work on models of deliberation has been funded by Volkswagen Stiftung. In the 4-year, €1.5m project, we will work with our partners, Valentin Gold at Göttingen, Annette Hautli-Janisz at Konstanz, Katarzyna Budzynska at Warsaw Politechnika, and John Parkinson at Maastricht to develop a “Deliberation Laboratory” that allows us to explore new interventions in deliberative democracy settings.

We’ve just heard that we’ve won funding under the extremely competitive AHRC-DFG Anglo-German bilateral programme in the Arts & Humanities in collaboration with Manfred Stede‘s team at Potsdam University. We’re going to be spending the next three years working with the UN and in particular looking at how conflicts evolve in the Security Council. The goal is to improve our understanding of how language reflects trajectories of conflict, and use that understanding both to deliver insight to geopolitical analysts and to make the workings of the UNSC more accessible to the general public. 

Our work with the BBC over 2018-2019 focused on helping school pupils to identify fake news by putting news articles under a critical thinking microscope. The Evidence Toolkit was rolled out to over 3,000 schools and was the first publicly deployed application to rely upon argument mining. Our work is described in an article just out in this month’s Communications of the ACM.