We are excited to be getting down to work today on a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation lead by Andrea Rocci at USI in Lugano.

We are going to be working on the argumentation dynamics in Earnings Conference Calls, a rich source of subtle and high-impact argument in the financial domain. With a particular focus on the ways that questions generate argumentative structures, the research builds on recent work that has established methodology, coupled with recent results in argument mining. It’s going to be fun!

The Centre for Argument Technology has secured several new research funding successes in the areas of enhancing participatory democracy, protecting privacy, countering disinformation and supporting the work of the intelligence community. As a result we currently have four new vacancies:

– A Research Project Manager at Grade 7 or 8 (£34,308 to £51,805 + 21% superannuation), depending on experience. This position is open to candidates with a PhD in *any* field (www.arg.tech/2022PDRA05).

– A Postdoctoral Research Associate in computational models of dialogue at Grade 7 (£34,308 to £42,155 + 21% superannuation; www.arg.tech/2022PDRA04).

– Two PhD studentships open to candidates from anywhere in the world with full scholarship plus stipend (www.arg.tech/2022PHD04) in argument analysis, mining, representation, navigation, manipulation and visualisation.

Closing date for all positions is 20 November 2022. Details on how to apply can be found at arg.tech/vacancies. Enquiries should be addressed to the director of the Centre, Prof. Chris Reed at chris@arg.tech.

A multi-million-dollar project to protect a person’s online identity is enlisting help from ARG-tech to develop software capable of detecting and disguising trademark linguistic patterns used by individuals online.

ARG-tech are receiving $2.5m of funding as part of a larger project consortium led by SRI International in California. The project is funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the United States Government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Dundee research forms part of IARPA’s Human Interpretable Attribution of Text Using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) program, a research effort aimed at advancing human language technology. The goals of the initiative are to help protect the identities of authors who could be endangered for speaking out, as well as developing means of identifying counterintelligence risks.

ARG-tech will utilise dialogical fingerprinting throughout the project: cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology processing dialogue models dating back centuries to develop a complete understanding of linguistic patterns.

A full Press Release is available at http://arg.tech/signature-pr.

This month we are delighted to welcome Nicole Orr and Ella Schad as members of the group. 

Nicole graduated from the Computing programme at Dundee, and has been working as annotator and sometime developer in the group since just before she started her undergraduate degree. She joins us as a Research Software Engineer working on a number of our annotation tools and the infrastructure that supports them.

Ella has been working as a part of our annotation pool for over a year, and joins us to start a PhD in linguistic models of argumentation, in which she will also be working on aspects of theory development and methodology.

The Centre for Argument Technology is hiring two PhD students, one in deep learning for argument mining, and the other in linguistic modelling of argumentation.

The Centre offers a well-resourced, highly interdisciplinary environment that works from philosophy through linguistics to AI and software engineering to develop and deploy high-impact solutions in sectors as diverse as education, law, politics and media. For a short summary of ARG-tech’s work, see youtu.be/xqetI4fFu_Y

These positions are open to ALL candidates, regardless of nationality. The studentships cover all fees, and include a tax-free stipend at UKRI rates (currently £16,062 per annum).

Closing date 17 June 2022. Applications with cover letter, CV, and names and contact details for three referees by email to jobs@arg.tech.

More information is available online at www.arg.tech/PHD202203.

The Centre has just released two vacancies in the AI/NLP subfield of argument mining: one for a PhD studentship and the other for a four-year senior postdoctoral appointment.

We are looking for a talented postdoctoral researcher to join a project exploring the role of argument mining in understanding and supporting public engagement with political processes. This 48-month position is at Grade 8 (£42k-£50k).

We are also looking to hire a PhD student with an interest in natural language processing, with a Masters or a good Bachelors in an appropriate subject to work on argument mining in financial discourse. The studentship is for 48 months and covers UKRI stipend (£16k tax-free) and fees at UK student rates only (candidates who do not qualify for UK student fees will be liable for the difference).

More information for the postdoc can be found at arg.tech/SSEN0407 and for the studentship at arg.tech/PHD202201 or by emailing the director, Prof. Chris Reed, chris@arg.tech. Deadline for applications 4 March 2022.

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.

This week we welcome Kamila Gorska and Alex Marcoci to the group. Kamila joins us to study for a PhD in automated argument processing. Alex joins as a postdoc working on Trajectories of Conflict in the context of debate at the UN Security Council.

ARG-tech keeps growing!