I have a 3 month research job at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam starting February 1 and working with Tom van Engers. This is part of the IMPACT project:
IMPACT is an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme. It will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.
My role will be to set up a Ph.D. research project concerning the key problem. This is based on an unsuccessful larger research proposal that I made with Tom. I’ll be organising the database, the literature, some of the software, and outlining the approach the student would take. I’ll make notes on the progress as it happens.
I’m looking forward to living for a while in Amsterdam, working with Tom and my other colleagues at the center — Joost Breuker, Rinke Hoekstra, Emile de Maat. The Netherlands also has a very lively Department of Argumentation Theory. As an added bonus, my colleagues from Linguistics, Susan Rothstein and Fred Landman, are in Amsterdam on sabbatical. Will be a very interesting and fun period.
One thought on “Research on Argumentation at the Leibniz Center for Law in Amsterdam”