Argument Mining from News and Social Web – a Short Tutorial

When: Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Where: PGH 232
Time: 10:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. George Petasis, National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”

Host: Prof. Ioannis Kakadiaris

Argumentation is a branch of philosophy that studies the act or process of forming reasons and of drawing conclusions in the context of a discussion, dialogue, or conversation. Being an important element of human communication, its use is very frequent in texts, as a means to convey meaning to the reader. Locating and identifying arguments may provide valuable help in identifying the various discussion issues, in following on how the discussion has evolved and what the discussion outcome might have been. This process is an aspect of the research field known as computational argumentation, which apart from identifying arguments, also studies the process of reasoning with arguments, and the process of the argumentation among computational agents. Computational aspects of argumentation can be roughly described by the following processing steps:

• Argument mining: the process of identifying arguments in documents.
• Argument resolution: the process of relating the argument components to each other.
• Argument representation/storage: the process of representing arguments into a suitable representation, such as an ontology or first-order logic.
• Argument querying: the process of reasoning with the extracted arguments.

This short tutorial focuses mainly on the first task, argument mining. It will provide an overview on argumentation, the structure of arguments, the state-of-art in argument mining from various types of documents, along with recent advances towards argument mining from the social web. Finally, the tutorial will present some recent applications of argument mining, especially in the area of e-governance and our experience through the NOMAD EU-funded project (http://nomad-project.eu/).

Bio:

Dr. Georgios Petasis is a post-doctoral researcher at the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL), in the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications at NCSR “Demokritos”, in Athens, Greece. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of Athens on the topic of machine learning for natural language processing. His research interests lie in the areas of natural language processing, knowledge representation and machine learning, including information extraction, ontology learning, linguistic resources, grammatical inference, speech synthesis and natural language processing infrastructures. He is the author of the Ellogon natural language engineering platform.

He is a member of the programme committees of several international conferences and he has been involved in more than 15 European and national research projects. Being a visiting professor at University of Patras, he has taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. His work has been published in more than 50 international journal, conferences and books. He is the treasurer and a member of the board of the Greek Artificial Intelligence Society (EETN). Finally he is co-founder of “Intellitech”, a Greek company specialising in natural language processing.