The MA colloquium at Konstanz’s Linguistics Department features a joint talk between members of ARG-tech, CELab and ADD-up on Monday, 26 November 2018. In `Argument Technology and Computational Ethos’, Chris Reed and Katarzyna Budzynska will talk about the following:
The establishment and growth of computational models of argument over the past 25 years has been a uniquely fruitful collaboration crossing disciplinary boundaries from humanities, through social and computational sciences, to engineering. Equally powerful as logos, the content of argument, is ethos, the character of the speaker, yet not well recognised by computational approaches. Most recently, argument mining in particular has enjoyed phenomenal success (followed in the last two years by ethos mining), exploding from nothing to a worldwide industry in barely half a decade. Despite ingenious theoretical creativity and ground-breaking innovative collaborations, the area has, however, largely struggled to deliver products and applications to end users. Why should this be? What are the challenges and dynamics that have stymied better uptake, and what can be done to improve this translational aspect? This talk draws on the experiences from the Centre for Argument Technology in the development of philosophical and linguistic theory, in the engineering of integrative and interoperable systems, and in working with a variety of partners. The goal is to unpack some of the connections between formal and human argumentation, and to explore the challenges and opportunities laying ahead of the field of argument technology and computational ethos.