We’re delighted to welcome Bonnie Webber here today: she’ll be talking to us about her work on discourse annotation and the new PDTB amongst other things, and we’ll then be looking at connections between PDTB and IAT. If you’d like to join the discussion in East lab, just fire an email to info@arg.tech.
Chris has been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board of ContactEngine, the London based AI tech company that supports new models of customer engagement. ContactEngine have put out a press release.
As the latest result from a decade-long collaboration between ARG-tech and the BBC, our Evidence Toolkit app is today releasing new functionality allowing users to select articles of their choice helping distinguish fake news from true. A key part of this release is a new ‘Reason Checker’ which represents the first large scale deployment of argument mining technology in the wild. The full Evidence Toolkit app is now available on the BBC Taster platform.
We’re excited to be launching software with BBC News today.
Following up on the success of our work livetweeting argument analytics with BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze and an associated Test Your Argument app last October, we have a new deployment of software to encourage thinking about thinking in partnership with BBC News. BBC News and BBC Academy are responsible for School Report, an educational initiative for improving critical thinking skills and helping young people distinguish real news from fake. BBC School Report is being made available to 1000 schools. For 11 to 15 year olds, the BBC is partnering with Aardman Animations in providing an educational game around the theme of fake news. For the older age group of 16-18 year olds, the BBC is partnering with the Centre for Argument Technology to deliver The Evidence Toolkit, for helping users analyse news articles to help them better understand what’s fake and what’s not. With a second phase to be released in a couple of days, this software represents the world’s first large-scale deployment of argument mining technology in the wild, and we’re thrilled that our research in the area can contribute to an educational mission led by the BBC focusing on such a pressing issue as fake news.
The full story is available with the BBC.
As part of the work ARG-tech has been doing with the BBC, an article on the BBC Radio 4 website entitled, 8 Ways to Win An Argument has this morning made the BBC homepage.
As well as edited copy from ARG-tech, the page also has links through to the ARG-tech developed Test Your Argument application hosted on BBC Taster.
The Centre for Argument Technology (ARG-tech) at the University of Dundee has signed an agreement with the BBC to deliver a suite of argument technology to be piloted in conjunction with BBC programming: a special edition of the Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4 broadcast at 8pm on 11 Oct 2017 and repeated on 14 Oct; a one-off TV debate hosted by Anne Robinson and broadcast at 9pm on Monday 16 Oct on BBC2, and a further episode of the Moral Maze from the BBC Archive, all tackling the issue of abortion on the occasion this month of the 50th anniversary of the Abortion Act in the UK.
Following a decade of collaboration between ARG-tech and BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze, this new agreement will see funding of work to prepare three exciting new argument technology applications. First, a set of argument analytics to be published on the Moral Maze website will give audiences an insight into the debate, and a web page on BBC Radio 4 will use them to offer tips on how to improve their own arguments. We will also be livetweeting some of the analytics as the programmes are aired. Second, BBC Taster will host ‘Test Your Argument’ for users to try their hand at building better arguments. And third, ARG-tech will host ‘Debater,’ a system that allows users to take on the role of the chair of the Moral Maze and recreate their own new debates. For more information, check out an article commissioned by the BBC as a part of their Expert Network (at www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41010848) and ARG-tech’s own site at www.arg.tech.
Our collaboration with Jean Wagemans of UVA continues and during his recent visit to ARGtech he also gave a talk ‘A factorial approach to argument classifaction’. Jean is currently working as a senior researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication (ACLC) of the same university. He is a co-author of the Handbook of Argumentation Theory and has published articles on classical dialectic and rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, and the characteristics of scientific argumentation. Find out more http://uva.academia.edu/jeanhmwagemans.
The first XCI2017 workshop co-organised by Chris Reed and Martin Peirera Ferina took place in early September during the INLG2017. The multidisciplinary event saw scientists from philosophy, computatinal linguistic and computer science take part generating an interesting and fruitful discussion. In addition to four presentations, we had an invited talk by Jose Alonso, a well-known researcher in the field of Computational Intelligence. We are delighted that the work concluded with a commitment from all participants to work together in this new and challenging area in the development of Artificial Intelligence.
Alison has recently secured funding from EPSRC on “Example-driven machine human collaboration in mathematics”, and work has now begun. In this project she will build on investigations into example-use in mathematics, and employ third party model generators, to design and build a system which can interface to online mathematical conversations. This will draw together theories of argumentation, automated reasoning systems, and ethnographical, cognitive and philosophical studies of how people do mathematics. The prototype system will be evaluated by running it on mathematical conversations in real-time, and seeing, by a variety of measures, whether mathematicians regard it as useful, and whether they are prepared to interact directly with it. The project (EP/P017320/1) will run from May, 2017 – October, 2018.
Many congratulations to Mathilde Janier, who today successfully defended her PhD thesis on Dialogical Dynamics and Argumentative Structures in Dispute Mediation Discourse. She was examined by Prof. Thomas Gordon from the University of Potsdam and Fraunhofer FOKUS, and by Dr. Alison Pease from Dundee.
