Category: linguistics

BiCi Seminar "Frontiers and Connections between Argumentation Theory and Natural Language Processing"

Bertinoro, Italy
Date
July 20th-25th, 2014
Location
Bertinoro International Center for Informatics (BiCi)
Bertinoro, Italy
The seminar will be held in the BiCi, which is located in the small medieval hilltop town of Bertinoro, Italy, about 50km east of Bologna. The town is picturesque. Meetings are held in an archiepiscopal castle that has been converted into a modern conference center.
Context
Large amounts of text are added to the Web daily from social media, web-based commerce, scientific papers, eGovernment consultations, etc. Such texts are used to make decisions in the sense that people read the texts, carry out some informal analysis, and then (in the best case) make a decision; for example, a consumer might read the comments on an Amazon website about a camera before deciding what camera to buy. The problem is that the information is distributed, unstructured, and not cumulative. In addition, the argument structure – justifications for a claim and criticisms – might be implicit or explicit within some document, but harder to discern across documents. The sheer volume of information overwhelms users. Given all these problems, reasoning about arguments on the web is currently infeasible.
A solution to these problems would be to develop tools to aggregate, synthesize, structure, summarize, and reason about arguments in texts. Such tools would enable users to search for particular topics and their justifications, trace through the argument (justifications for justifications and so on), as well as to systematically and formally reason about the graph of arguments. By doing so, a user would have a better, more systematic basis for making a decision. However, deep, manual analysis of texts is time-consuming, knowledge intensive, and thus unscalable. To acquire, generate, and transmit the arguments, we need scalable machine-based or machine-supported approaches to extract arguments. The application of tools to mine arguments would be very broad and deep given the variety of contexts where arguments appear and the purposes they are put to.
On the one hand, text analysis is a promising approach to identify and extract arguments from text, receiving attention from the natural language processing community. For example, there are approaches on argumentation mining of legal documents, on-line debates, product reviews, newspaper articles, court cases, scientific articles, and other areas. On the other hand, computational models of argumentation have made substantial progress in providing abstract, formal models to represent and reason over complex argumentation graphs. The literature covers alternative models, a range of semantics, complexity, and formal dialogues. Yet, there needs to be progress not only within each domain, but in bridging between textual and abstract representations of argument so as to enable reasoning from source text.
To make progress and realize automated argumentation, a range of interdisciplinary approaches, skills, and collaborations are required, covering natural language processing technology, linguistic theories of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse, domain knowledge such as law and science, computer science techniques in artificial intelligence, argumentation theory, and computational models of argumentation.
Objectives and Outcomes
The objective of the seminar is to gather an interdisciplinary group of scholars together for an extended, collaborative discussion about the various aspects of connecting argumentation and natural language processing. The intended outcome of the seminar is a roadmap that outlines the state-of-the art, identifies key problems and issues, and suggests approaches to addressing them. More precisely, theseminar is conceived for the writing of a monograph “A Prospective View of Argumentation Theory and Natural Language Processing” that should become a standard reference in the field and should provide guidelines for future research by putting that activity in focus and identify the most significant research issues in combining these two research fields. This roadmap will have several sections authored by the participants at the seminar and edited by the seminar organizers.
Format and Process
The seminar will adopt a structure, where personal interaction and open discussion are prominent, emphasizing discussion of results, ideas, sketches, works in progress, and open problems. Participants will be requested to prepare individual contributions around specific topics (see a tentative list below) so that the outcome of the workshop will constitute a roadmap for the area to be published in the near future. The allocation of topics as well as the mechanism for compiling and elaborating contributions into a coherent draft — that will form the working document for the workshop — will be made known in a future communication to those individuals who accept to participate in this workshop.
Currently we have identified the following areas of research to be presented for discussion at the workshop (and we welcome suggestions about additional topics):

  • Automatic identification of argument elements and relationships between arguments in a document;
  • Argumentation and negation & contrariness;
  • Argumentation and discourse;
  • Argumentation and dialogue;
  • Approaches combining NLP methods and argumentation frameworks;
  • Creation/evaluation of high quality annotated natural language corpora to prove argumentative models on naturally occurring data, or to train automatic systems on tasks related to argumentation (e.g. arguments detection).
  • Applications of argumentation mining: summarization, extraction, visualization, retrieval;

Organizers
Elena Cabrio
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Mediterranee, France
elena.cabrio@inria.fr
http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Elena.Cabrio
Serena Villata
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Mediterranee, France
serena.villata@inria.fr
http://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Serena.Villata
Adam Wyner
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
azwyner@abdn.ac.uk
http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware
Structure of Position Paper Submissions
Participants will be expected to submit position papers (with references) prior to the seminar. Submissions details will be discussed over the course of the seminar. The seminar organizers will facilitate a fruitful exchange of ideas and information in order to integrate the discussion topics.
Position papers should follow the two-column format of ACL 2014 proceedings without exceeding eight (6) pages of content plus two extra pages for references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files. Submissions must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in the ACL style files, and they must be in PDF.
Subsequent to the seminar, draft roadmap documents will be circulated amongst the participants for further discussion and prior to submission for publication. We plan to publish the roadmap in a volume of the CEUR workshop proceedings series. In addition, we have a journal that has agreed to publish a special issue based on expanded and revised versions of the material presented at the workshop.
Organizational Issues
The total registration fees for each person for the whole stay (arrival Sunday evening – departure Friday after lunch) are 600 Euro. Participants pay their own costs; however, organizers are seeking funding to defray the expenses. We will update as information becomes available. Fees include seminar registration, accommodation, WiFi and meals (included an excursion and the social dinner).
BiCi Registration
Shortlink

Paper in CMNA 2010 Post-proceedings

I’m co-author of a paper in a post-workshop proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument in 2010 and 2011.
Working on the Argument Pipeline: Through Flow Issues between Natural Language Argument, Instantiated Arguments, and Argumentation Frameworks
Adam Wyner, Tom van Engers, and Anthony Hunter
Abstract
In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g. natural language, and forms which can be automatically processed; second, reasoning with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the knowledge. Given such complexities, it is labour and knowledge intensive to conduct policy consultations, where participants contribute statements to the policy discourse. Yet, from such a consultation, we want to derive policy positions, where each position is a set of consistent statements, but where positions may be mutually inconsistent. To address these problems and support policy-making consultations, we consider recent automated techniques in natural language processing, instantiating arguments, and reasoning with the arguments in argumentation frameworks. We discuss application and “bridge” issues between these techniques, outlining a pipeline of technologies whereby: expressions in a controlled natural language are parsed and translated into a logic (a literals and rules knowledge base), from which we generate instantiated arguments and their relationships using a logic-based formalism (an argument knowledge base), which is then input to an implemented argumentation framework that calculates extensions of arguments (an argument extensions knowledge base), and finally, we extract consistent sets of expressions (policy positions). The paper reports progress towards reasoning with web-based, distributed, collaborative, incomplete, and inconsistent knowledge bases expressed in natural language.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerVanEngersHunterCMNAPOST2013,
author = {Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers and Anthony Hunter},
title = {Working on the Argument Pipeline: Through Flow Issues between Natural
Language Argument, Instantiated Arguments, and Argumentation Frameworks},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument},
year = {2013},
editor = {??},
pages = {??-??},
note = {To appear}
}
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By Adam Wyner

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Argumentation and Linguistics Tutorial at ACAI 2013

I presented a tutorial on Argumentation and Linguistics at the Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI 2013) held at the Department of Informatics, King’s College London. The course focussed on Argumentation and Artificial Intelligence. From the description:

The ACAI Summer School 2013 (ACAI 2013) will be held at at King’s College London, UK, from the 1st July to the 5th July 2013 and is on the topic of Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. Computational models of argument, and the development of agreement technologies, is becoming an important area in artificial intelligence. The aim of the summer school is to provide the attendees with a solid grounding in the basic ideas in formal modelling of argumentation, dialogue, and negotiation. Furthermore, there will be a programme of lectures on application areas, lab sessions on software developments, and lectures linking with areas in AI and beyond.

There were about 40 students in attendance. The ACAI course on argumentation covered a good, broad range of topics, presented by my european colleagues. The core of the programme consisted of four main speakers who gave 6 hours of lectures:

  • Pietro Baroni (Università degli Studi di Brescia) on Abstract Argumentation
  • Philippe Besnard (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) on Logic-Based Argumentation
  • Nicolas Maudet (University Pierre et Marie Curie) on Negotiation
  • Simon Parsons (University of Liverpool) on Dialogue

There were also presentations on applications of argumentation and agreement technologies:

  • Leila Amgoud (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) on Argumentation in Decision-Making
  • Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool) on Argumentation in eGovernment
  • John Fox (University of Oxford) on Argumentation in Medicine
  • Nir Oren (University of Aberdeen) on Argumentation in Planning
  • Henry Prakken (Utrecht University) on Argumentation in Law
  • Chris Reed (University of Dundee) on Argumentation on the Web
  • Stefan Woltran (Vienna University of Technology) on Implementation of Argumentation
  • Adam Wyner (University of Aberdeen) on Argumentation and Linguistics

The slides of my talk are available on the link:
Argumentation and Linguistics
Adam Wyner
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By Adam Wyner

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Paper at RuleML Special Session on Human-Rules

I’m co-author of a paper in the special session Human-Rules at The 7th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML 2013), Seattle, Washington, USA.
Seattle, Washington, USA
A Study on Translating Regulatory Rules from Natural Language to Defeasible Logic
Adam Wyner and Guido Governatori
Abstract
Legally binding regulations are expressed in natural language. Yet, we cannot formally or automatically reason with regulations in that form. Defeasible Logic has been used to formally represent the semantic interpretation of regulations; such representations may provide the abstract specification for a machine-readable and processable representation as in LegalRuleML. However, manual translation is prohibitively costly in terms of time, labour, and knowledge. The paper discusses work in progress using the state-of-the-art in automatic translation of a sample of regulatory clauses to a machine readable formal representation and a comparison to correlated Defeasible Logic representations. It outlines some key problems and proposes tasks to address the problems.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerGovernatoriH-R2013,
author = {Adam Wyner and Guido Governatori},
title = {A Study on Translating Regulatory Rules from Natural Language to Defeasible Logic},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {R}ule{ML} 2013},
publisher = {{CEUR}},
year = {2013},
pages = {??-??},
address = {Seattle, Washington, USA},
note = {To appear}
}
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By Adam Wyner

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Tutorial on "Textual Information Extraction from Legal Resources" at the 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Rome, Italy

Topic

Legal resources such as legislation, public notices, case law, and other legally relevant documents are increasingly freely available on the internet. They are almost entirely presented in natural language and in text. Legal professionals, researchers, and students need to extract and represent information from such resources to support compliance monitoring, analyse cases for case based reasoning, and extract information in the discovery phase of a trial (e-discovery), amongst a range of possible uses. To support such tasks, powerful text analytic tools are available. The tutorial presents an in depth demonstration of one toolkit the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) with examples and several briefer demonstrations of other tools.

Goals

Participants in the tutorial should come away with some theoretical sense of what textual information extraction is about. They will also see some practical examples of how to work with a corpus of materials, develop an information extraction system using GATE and the other tools, and share their results with the research community. Participants will be provided with information on where to find additional materials and learn more.

Intended Audience

The intended audience includes legal researchers, legal professionals, law school students, and political scientists who are new to text processing as well as experienced AI and Law researchers who have used NLP, but wish to get a quick overview of using GATE.

Covered Topics

  • Motivations to annotate, extract, and represent legal textual information.
  • Uses and domains of textual information extraction. Sample materials from legislation, case decisions, gazettes, e-discovery sources, among others.
  • Motivations to use an open source tool for open source development of textual information extraction tools and materials.
  • The relationship to the semantic web, linked documents, and data visualisation.
  • Linguistic/textual problems that must be addressed.
  • Alternative approaches (statistical, knowledge-light, machine learning) and a rationale for a particular bottom-up, knowledge-heavy approach in GATE.
  • Outline of natural language processing modules and tasks.
  • Introduction to GATE – loading and running simple applications, inspecting the results, refining the search results.
  • Development of fragments of a GATE system – lists, rules, and examination of results.
  • Discussion of more complex constructions and issues such as fact pattern identification, which is essential for case-based reasoning, named entity recognition, and structures of documents.
  • Introduction to ontologies.
  • Link textual information extraction to ontologies.
  • Introduction to related tools and approaches: C&C/Boxer (parser and semantic interpreter), Attempto Controlled English, scraperwiki, among others.

Date, Time, Location, and Logistics

Monday, June 10, afternoon session.
The tutorial was held at the Casa dell’Aviatore, viale dell’Università 20 in Rome, Italy.
Information about the conference is available at the website for the 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Law (ICAIL).

Slides

The slides from the presentation are available here:
Textual Information Extraction from Legal Resources

Further Information

Contact the lecturer.

Lecturer

Dr. Adam Wyner
Lecturer, Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Scotland
azwyner at abdn dot ac dot uk
Website
The lecturer has a PhD in Linguistics, a PhD in Computer Science, and research background in computational linguistics. The lecturer has previously given a tutorial on this topic at JURIX 2009 and ICAIL 2011 along with an invited talk at RuleML 2012, has published several conference papers on text analytics of legal resources using GATE and C&C/Boxer, and continues to work on text analysis of legal resources.
A shortlink to this webpage
By Adam Wyner
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Papers at JURIX 2012

I’m co-author of two papers at The 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2012), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Links to the final drafts are forthcoming.
A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation
Adam Wyner, Maya Wardeh, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Katie Atkinson
Abstract
Domain models have proven useful as the basis for the construction and evaluation of arguments to support deliberation about policy proposals. Using a model provides the means to systematically examine and understand the fine-grained objections that individuals might have about the policy. While in previous approaches, a justification for a policy proposal is presented for critique by the user, here, we reuse the domain model to invert the roles of the citizen and the government: a policy proposal is elicited from the citizen, and a software agent automatically and systematically critiques it relative to the model and the government’s point of view. Such an approach engages citizens in a critical dialogue about the policy actions, which may lead to a better understanding of the implications of their proposals and that of the government. A web-based tool that interactively leads users through the critique is presented.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerEtAlCritique2012,
author = {Adam Wyner and Wardeh, Maya and Trevor Bench-Capon and Katie Atkinson},
title = {A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2012)},
year = {2012},
pages = {167-176},
address = {Amsterdam},
publisher = {IOS Press}
comment = {Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. Jurix 2012: The AA-th Annual Conference}
}
An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws
Adam Wyner, Johan Bos, Valerio Basile, and Paulo Quaresma
Abstract
To make legal texts machine processable, the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translated to formal representations that can be automatically reasoned with. The paper considers the latter, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a form that can be reasoned with by a computer, sentences must be parsed and formally represented. The paper presents the state-of-the-art in automatic translation of law to a machine readable formal representation, provides corpora, outlines some key problems, and proposes tasks to address the problems.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerEtAlSemanticRep2012,
author = {Adam Wyner and Bos, Johan and Valerio Basile and Paulo Quaresma},
title = {An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Law},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2012)},
year = {2012},
pages = {177-180},
address = {Amsterdam},
publisher = {IOS Press}
}
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By Adam Wyner

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Presentations at CMNA 2012 and RuleML 2012

I have gave a talk about my paper at the ECAI workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argumentation 2012 and also presented an invited talk at the RuleML 2012 conference. The PDFs of these talks are below.
Questions, arguments, and natural language semantics
Translating Rules in Natural Language to RuleML
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By Adam Wyner

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Papers at CMNA 2012 and AT 2012

Recent papers at two conferences. One is in the 12th workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 2012), Montpellier, France. A second paper is in the 1st International Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT 2012), Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Questions, arguments, and natural language semantics
Adam Wyner
Abstract
Computational models of argumentation can be understood to bridge between human and automated reasoning. Argumentation schemes represent stereotypical, defeasible reasoning patterns. Critical questions are associated with argumentation schemes and are said to attack arguments. The paper highlights several issues with the current understanding of critical questions in argumentation. It provides a formal semantics for questions, an approach to instantiated argumentation schemes, and shows how the semantics of questions clarifies the issues. In this approach, questions do not attack schemes, though answers to questions might.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerCMNA2012,
author = {Adam Wyner},
title = {Questions, Arguments, and Natural Language Semantics},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argumentation ({CMNA} 2012)},
year = {2012},
address = {Montpellier, France},
note = {To appear}}
Arguing from a Point of View
Adam Wyner and Jodie Schneider
Abstract
Evaluative statements, where some entity has a qualitative attribute, appear widespread in blogs, political discussions, and consumer websites. Such expressions can occur in argumentative settings, where they are the conclusion of an argument. Whether the argument holds depends on a the premises that express a user’s point of view. Where different users disagree, arguments may arise. There are several ways to represent users, e.g. by values and other parameters. The paper proposes models and argumentation schemes for evaluative expressions, where the arguments and attacks between arguments are relative to a user’s model.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerSchneider2012AT,
author = {Adam Wyner and Jodi Schneider},
title = {Arguing from a Point of View},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the First International Conference on Agreement Technologies},
year = {2012},
address = {Dubrovnick, Croatia},
note = {To appear}}
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By Adam Wyner

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21st Century Law Practice and Law Tech Camp Presentations

As part of the 21st Century Law Practice Summer London Law Program, I had the opportunity to present a class on Topics in Natural Language Processing of Legal Texts. My thanks to Dan Katz for organising this and to the class for their interest.
Dan, co-organiser Renee Knake at Michigan State University, and their colleagues at the University of Westminster are up to good things in law and technology – well worth watching.
To cap off the Law Program, the summer program organised a Law Tech Camp of short and TED style presentations on topics. It is an excellent program of talks from members of the legal industry, practicing lawyers, and academics. I have a talk about Crowdsourcing Legal Text Annotation, which is also discussed in a previous post. The talks are videotaped and made available online (TBA).
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By Adam Wyner

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Papers at the Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT 2012)

Two short papers appear in the proceedings of LREC Workshop on SPLeT 2012 – Semantic Processing of Legal Texts. The papers are available on the links.
Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts – A Position Paper
Adam Wyner
Abstract
Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences must be parsed and semantically translated. Manual translation is time and labour intensive, usually involving narrowly scoping the rules. While automated translation systems have made significant progress, problems remain. The paper outlines systems to automatically translate legislative clauses to a semantic representation, highlighting key problems and proposing some tasks to address them.
Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware
Adam Wyner and Wim Peters
Abstract
Large corpora of legal texts are increasing available in the public domain. To make them amenable for automated text processing, various sorts of annotations must be added. We consider semantic annotations bearing on the content of the texts – legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. Adding annotations and developing gold standard corpora (to verify rule-based or machine learning algorithms) is costly in terms of time, expertise, and cost. To make the processes efficient, we propose several instances of GATE’s Teamware to support annotation tasks for legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. We engage annotation volunteers (law school students and legal professionals). The reports on the tasks are to be presented at the workshop.
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By Adam Wyner

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