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.
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.
Chris was today giving evidence at the All Party Parliamentary Group on AI at the House of Lords. The focus of his contribution was on the reality of AI’s competence and the great distance that remains before AGI is imminent.
The start of the year has seen some exciting staff changes in ARG-tech. We welcome Dimitra Zografistou, who joins us from FORTH to work on models of argument representation. Rory Duthie is finishing writing up his thesis and starting to work as a research assistant on connections between argumentation and hypotheses. And finally, John Lawrence and Jacky Visser have both been appointed to permanent lectureships in the group.
Exciting times!
Our survey of the field of Argument Mining in Computational Linguistics has recently become the most cited review in the area. It provides the most up-to-date review currently accessible and is available online.
Abstract. Argument Mining is the automatic identification and extraction of the structure of inference and reasoning expressed as arguments presented in natural language. Understanding argumentative structure makes it possible to determine not only what positions people are adopting, but also why they hold the opinions they do, providing valuable insights in domains as diverse as financial market prediction and public relations. This paper explores the techniques that establish the foundations for argument mining, provides a review of recent advances in argument mining techniques, and discusses the challenges faced in automatically extracting a deeper understanding of reasoning expressed in language in general.
On Monday 17th June, Chris is addressing the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee at Westminster at its monthly meeting which this month is dedicated to the theme of Fake News. He’ll be talking on what fake news isn’t as well as what it is — and the consequences for what can be done.
