Rory Duthie is this week starting a PhD in the group funded by an EPSRC Doctoral Training Account award. He will be supervised by Katarzyna Budzynska and working on argument mining with a particular focus on ethos.
Welcome Rory!
We are pleased to welcome Joonsuk Park, a graduate student from Cornell, who is visiting ARG-tech from mid June until the end of August. He will be working on various aspects of argument mining whilst he’s here.
ARG-tech has a strong showing at the first European Conference on Argumentation in Lisbon this week. There are six papers from the group:
We look forward to seeing you there.
The ARG-tech tool for Online Visualisation of Argument, OVA, is released today. For the past eighteen months, OVA has been in use in beta form by research groups and educators around the world, with their feedback and suggestions helping to improve the software.
OVA provides a simple and intuitive interface for analysing argumentation, and is a native Argument Web tool which means that it can interact with the wide variety of other applications and systems which use AIF, including Araucaria, Argublogging, argugrader and others.
OVA runs in a browser and can be used to analyse text files or web pages. It provides argumentation schemes for capturing stereotypical patterns of reasoning, and also conflict schemes for capturing patterns of rebutting and undercutting attack. Analyses can be saved locally or directly to the Argument Web where they can be navigated using the AIFdb search interface, corpus management and other tools. It also supports online collaborative working, allowing remote teams to work together on argument analysis in real time.
OVA can be found online at http://ova.arg-tech.org (or, if you would rather play with a test deployment that does not add its data to the live Argument Web servers, you can try http://test.ova.arg-tech.org)
This is the first public release of OVA, and as usual we are keen to get comments and feedback.
A short video introducing OVA is also available.
Dispute Mediation Workshop
9-10 March 2015, Queen Mother Building, School of Computing Dundee.
ARG-tech will be hosting a 2-day workshop on practical applications and uses of technology in mediation practice. The main aim of the workshop is to bring together academics and practicing mediators to identify key challenges and avenues to solutions, in order to build a roadmap for worldwide research and development in this crucial area.
Olena Yaskorska is visiting ARG-tech from the beginning of February until the end of June 2015. Olena is currently a PhD student at the Polish National Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Katarzyna Budzynska, though she comes to ARG-tech almost directly from our colleagues at USI Lugano, where she has been based for the past year.
Olena is working on models of argument in dialogue and particularly on their automatic recognition.
We are delighted that Barbara (Basia) Konat today joins ARG-tech, employed on the TSB-funded Argument Analytics project.
She will be working closely with the PI, Katarzyna Budzynska and the company partner, J & L Technology Ltd.
We are excited to announce that applications are invited for two positions in Dundee: a postdoctoral research assistant for the TSB- & EPSRC-funded project “Argument Analytics” (starting from Nov 2014); and for a PhD student for the EPSRC DTG-funded project “Recognizing Trust in Natural Language” (starting in 2015).
Jeff Thompson from UCLA is visiting the group today and will be giving a seminar entitled, ‘Networking for Reliable Knowledge,’ looking at the connection between information-centric networking and argumentation.
Abstract. For an information system to deliver reliable knowledge, it must reliably access the raw supporting data and provide a means to evaluate the concluded knowledge based on that data. For reliable data access, we review future internet architectures for information-centric networking which address the problem of broken and compromised links, and we focus on features of cryptographic hash-based links. For evaluating knowledge, we review knowledge representation using argumentation systems with a focus on assumption-based arguments. Finally, we sketch a system which uses argumentation to deliver reliable knowledge which is supported by secure hash-based links to evidence, is independent of storage location or central authority and implements knowledge revision from new evidence.
Brief biography. Jeff has been a staff software engineer for the future internet Name Data Networking (NDN) project at the University of California, Los Angeles since 2013 where he develops networking libraries for C++, JavaScript, Python and Java. As an undergraduate, he studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT. His Masters work was in microrobotics and automation at the UC Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. Jeff’s industry experience includes software architecture, API design and release management for a commercial cryptography library and creating tool automation and a semantic tracking database system for a micromachine manufacturing facility. As an independent researcher, Jeff develops open-source software for logic and argumentation systems for knowledge representation.
We’ll be in Wolfson in the QMB at noon, 29th August 2014. All welcome.
The Centre for Argument Technology at the University of Dundee is organising a workshop on Argument Mining under the auspices of SICSA, focusing on links with Information Extraction, Information Retrieval and Text Mining. The workshop will be opened by Marie-Francine Moens, head of the Language Intelligence and Information retrieval (LIIR) research group at Leuven and SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow.
The event is hosted by the School of Computing at the University of Dundee, 9-10 July 2014, and invites expressions of interest for participation.
More information can be found on the workshop homepage.
