Dagstuhl Seminar 15512
Debating Technologies
( Dec 13 – Dec 18, 2015 )
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https://www.dagstuhl.de/15512
Organizers
- Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt, DE)
- Eduard H. Hovy (Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, US)
- Noam Slonim (IBM - Haifa, IL)
- Benno Stein (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, DE)
Contact
- Andreas Dolzmann (for scientific matters)
- Annette Beyer (for administrative matters)
Dagstuhl Seminar Wiki
- Dagstuhl Seminar Wiki (Use personal credentials as created in DOOR to log in)
Shared Documents
- Dagstuhl Materials Page (Use personal credentials as created in DOOR to log in)
Impacts
- Computational Argumentation Quality Assessment in Natural Language : article in : Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 17) - Wachsmuth, Henning; Naderi, Nona; Hou, Yufang; Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar; Thijm, Tim Alberdingk; Stein, Benno M.; Hirst, Graeme; Bilu, Yonatan - ICAL, 2017. - 24 pp. - (15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics : article).
- Debating Technology for Dialogical Argument : Sensemaking, Engagement, and Analytics : article - Lawrence, John; Snaith, Mark; Konat, Barbara; Budzynska, Katarzyna; Reed, Chris - New York : ACM, 2017 - (ACM transactions on internet technology ; 17. 2017, 3).
Schedule
Why do people in all societies argue, discuss, and debate? Apparently, we do so not only to convince others of our own opinions, but because we want to explore the differences between our own understanding and the conceptualizations of others, and learn from them. Being one of the primary intellectual activities of the human mind, debating therefore naturally involves a wide range of conceptual capabilities and activities, ones that have only in part been studied from a computational perspective.
This Dagstuhl seminar is the first of its kind. We would like to set the grounds for a new interdisciplinary research community, interested in Debating Technologies, defined henceforth as computational technologies developed directly to enhance, support, and engage with human debating. We intend to bring together leading researchers from many relevant communities, to discuss the future of debating technologies in a holistic manner.
Thus, we expect to discuss issues related to debating-oriented information retrieval, argumentation mining, opinion mining, debating polarity analysis, persuasive content generation, computational emotion analysis, debating technologies applications, and more. The seminar is expected to outline an initial conceptual framework for debate support systems that should provide the groundwork for many years of fruitful research in a variety of individual topics as well as their assembly in various combinations.
Moreover, we expect to define and shape a set of corresponding problems to be addressed, and to highlight the associated challenges of exploiting big data, that may further come in the form of multiple modalities, including text, audio, image, and video. Correspondingly, we intend to define a roadmap for establishing a new interdisciplinary research community around debating technologies, for which the seminar will serve as the first prominent scientific event, with hopefully many future events to come.
Why do people in all societies argue, discuss, and debate? Apparently, we do so not only to convince others of our own opinions, but because we want to explore the differences between our own understanding and the conceptualizations of others, and learn from them. Being one of the primary intellectual activities of the human mind, debating naturally involves a wide range of conceptual capabilities and activities, ones that have only in part been studied from a computational perspective in fields like computational linguistics and natural language processing. As a result, computational technologies supporting human debating are scarce, and typically still in their infancy. Recent decades, however, have seen the emergence and flourishing of many related and requisite computational tasks, including sentiment analysis, opinion and argumentation mining, natural language generation, text summarization, dialogue systems, recommendation systems, question answering, emotion recognition/generation, automated reasoning, and expressive text to speech.
This Dagstuhl seminar was the first of its kind. It laid the groundwork for a new interdisciplinary research community centered around debating technologies - computational technologies developed directly to enhance, support, and engage with human debating. The seminar brought together leading researchers from relevant communities to discuss the future of debating technologies in a holistic manner.
The seminar was held between 13 and 18 December 2015, with 31 participants from 22 different institutions. The event’s sixteen sessions included 34 talks, thirteen themed discussions, three system demonstrations, and a hands-on "unshared" task. Besides the plenary presentations and discussions, the program included several break-out sessions and mock debates with smaller working groups. The presentations addressed a variety of topics, from high-level overviews of rhetoric, argument structure, and argument mining to low-level treatments of specific issues in textual entailment, argumentation analysis, and debating-oriented information retrieval. Collective discussions were arranged for most of these topics, as well as on more forward-thinking themes, such as the potential and limitations of debating technologies, identification of further relevant research communities, and plans for a future interdisciplinary research agenda.
A significant result of the seminar was the decision to use the term computational argumentation to put the community’s various perspectives (argument mining, argument generation, debating technologies, etc.) under the same umbrella. By analogy with "computational linguistics", "computational argumentation" denotes the application of computational methods for analyzing and synthesizing argumentation and human debate. We identified a number of key research questions in computational argumentation, namely:
- How important are semantics and reasoning for real-world argumentation?
- To what extent should computational argumentation concern itself with the three classical rhetorical appeals of ethos (appeal to authority), pathos (appeal to emotion), and logos (appeal to reason)? Is it sufficient to deal with logos, or is there some benefit in studying or modelling ethos and pathos as well?
- What are the best ways of dealing with implicit knowledge?
A number of discussion questions at the seminar followed from these points, particularly in relation to the data and knowledge sources required for implementing and evaluating computational argumentation systems. For example, are currently available datasets sufficient for large-scale processing or for cross-language and cross-domain adaptation? Can we reliably annotate logos, ethos, and pathos? In any case, what sort of data would be considered "good" for a shared task in computational argumentation? Is it possible for computational argumentation to repeat the recent successes of "deep" natural language processing by employing shallow methods on large masses of data? How does cultural background impact human argumentation, and is this something that computational models need to account for? Finding the answers to these and other questions is now on the agenda for our burgeoning research community.
Creative Commons BY 3.0 Unported license
Iryna Gurevych, Eduard H. Hovy, Noam Slonim, and Benno Stein
- Khalid Al-Khatib (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, DE) [dblp]
- Jens Allwood (University of Göteborg, SE) [dblp]
- Carlos Alzate (IBM Research - Dublin, IE) [dblp]
- Wolf-Tilo Balke (TU Braunschweig, DE) [dblp]
- Yonatan Bilu (IBM - Haifa, IL) [dblp]
- Elena Cabrio (INRIA Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée, FR) [dblp]
- Claire Cardie (Cornell University, US) [dblp]
- Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, BE) [dblp]
- Ido Dagan (Bar-Ilan University - Ramat Gan, IL) [dblp]
- Anita de Waard (Elsevier Labs - Jericho, US) [dblp]
- Anette Frank (Universität Heidelberg, DE) [dblp]
- Norbert Fuhr (Universität Duisburg-Essen, DE) [dblp]
- Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt, DE) [dblp]
- Ivan Habernal (TU Darmstadt, DE) [dblp]
- Graeme Hirst (University of Toronto, CA) [dblp]
- Yufang Hou (IBM Research - Dublin, IE) [dblp]
- Eduard H. Hovy (Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, US) [dblp]
- Christoph Lofi (TU Braunschweig, DE) [dblp]
- Marie-Francine Moens (KU Leuven, BE) [dblp]
- Brian Plüss (The Open University - Milton Keynes, GB) [dblp]
- Vinodkumar Prabhakaran (Stanford University, US) [dblp]
- Chris Reed (University of Dundee, GB) [dblp]
- Nils Reiter (Universität Stuttgart, DE) [dblp]
- Ruty Rinott (IBM - Haifa, IL) [dblp]
- Hinrich Schütze (LMU München, DE) [dblp]
- Noam Slonim (IBM - Haifa, IL) [dblp]
- Christian Stab (TU Darmstadt, DE) [dblp]
- Manfred Stede (Universität Potsdam, DE) [dblp]
- Benno Stein (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, DE) [dblp]
- Simone Teufel (University of Cambridge, GB) [dblp]
- Henning Wachsmuth (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, DE) [dblp]
Classification
- artificial intelligence / robotics
- data bases / information retrieval
- society / human-computer interaction
Keywords
- Debating
- human-machine interaction
- interactive systems
- discourse and dialogue
