The summer of 2024 has been a good one for people working in ARG-tech. First of all, both John and Jacky were promoted to Senior Lecturer (roughly equivalent to Associate Professor), reflecting the growth in their research portfolio and international profile. Shortly afterwards, we heard that Brian has been appointed Associate Dean for Student Recruitment & Global Partnerships reflecting his commitment to operations and recruitment overseas across the entire School of Science and Engineering. Finally for her outstanding dedication to research over the past year, Eimear has, uniquely in the School, been awarded accelerated advancement in her postdoctoral role. Many, many congratulations to Eimear, Brian, Jacky and John.

We have a full-time permanent postdoctoral researcher position in computational linguistics. The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to the EU-funded TITAN project in the context of fake news and disinformation.

For informal enquiries please contact Dr John Lawrence at j.lawrence@dundee.ac.uk. For further details and to apply follow this link. Closing date 8th April 2024.

2024 is getting off to a fabulous start with several changes in the team. First of all we welcome Yevhen Kostiuk who comes to us from Mexico City, and Ayah Soufan who had slightly less distance to travel, coming from Glasgow. They are both joining as postdoctoral researchers. We also welcome back Debela Gemechu, who finished his PhD here in 2021 and then went to work for ContactEngine (which was subsequently acquired by NICE systems) whilst remaining affiliated with ARG-tech as Industrial Fellow in Residence; he rejoins us now as a postdoctoral researcher. Finally, we’re also thrilled to see Elaine McIntyre advancing to a more senior role in supporting the operations of the Centre — anyone who has any dealings with ARG-tech will know that Elaine is a lynchpin of organisational management, so it is super to see her work recognised in this way.

So welcome to Ayah and Yevhen, welcome back to Debela, and congratulations to Elaine! 2024 is going to be a great year!

ARG-tech will be present this year in Singapore at EMNLP 2023 and the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining. Two papers co-authored by ARG-tech members have been accepted to the EMNLP Main Conference and one paper to the Workshop on Argument Mining.

In the EMNLP long paper titled ‘Automatic Debate Evaluation with Argumentation Semantics and Natural Language Argument Graph Networks’ and co-authored by Ramon Ruiz-Dolz, we propose a hybrid method that combines concepts from Computational Argumentation theory and Natural Language Processing to predict the outcome of complete debates in academic debate tournaments.

In the EMNLP short paper titled ‘VivesDebate-Speech: A Corpus of Spoken Argumentation to Leverage Audio Features for Argument Mining’, we publicly release the largest speech corpus containing argument annotations. In addition to the corpus, initial results on the task of argument mining from spoken data are reported, pointing out that acoustic features can be a relevant addition to textual features in the segmentation of argumentative components.

Finally, in the Argument Mining Workshop paper titled ‘Detecting Argumentative Fallacies in the Wild: Problems and Limitations of Large Language Models’ and authored by Ramon Ruiz-Dolz and John Lawrence, we explore the limitations of the existing approaches to identify fallacies with state-of-the-art LLMs. We conduct an error analysis considering specific instances of arguments and rise a discussion in which we suggest the use of more complete models of argumentation that can make possible to overcome the limitations of the state-of-the-art LLMs.

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.

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.