Category: Policy-making

Recent THiNK Workshop at Aberdeen

I was a co-organiser, with Prof. Barbara Fennell, of Policy-making, Text Analysis, and Big Data: A Workshop in Digital Humanities and Knowledge Exchange, which was held at the University of Aberdeen, June 30 in the Sir Duncan Rice Library.
Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen.
The THiNK network is for Knowledge Exchange in the Arts and Humanities in the UK. It provides a forum in which various parties exchange knowledge about funding ideas and opportunities. I was a presenter at a recent THiNK Event in London and see also my previous post.
The follow-on workshop, Policy-making, Text Analysis, and Big Data: A Workshop in Digital Humanities/Knowledge Exchange focussed on issues relating to Text Analysis, Policy-making, and Big Data. The underlying idea is that we have to harvest textual data on a large scale in order to assist with public policy-making. The full announcement, slides, and further notes about the workshop are at the link above; below is some extracted information.

Workshop description:

Policy-making and the law are fundamental to communal life and social progress. Given that policies and law are expressed in language and in social contexts, they are a natural “object” to study in the Humanities. One new approach is to apply current text analytic and information retrieval tools to better understand the substance of the policy documents, deliberative discourse, and related documents. More broadly, textual analysis and retrieval is at the heart of a range of interdisciplinary and applied research; it is a key element of Digital Humanities. While small scale studies are feasible and illuminating, it is essential to scale up research to handle the abundance of textual information, so-called ‘Big Data’. We have organised a workshop of speakers and discussion sessions to consider the state-of-the art in policy-making, textual analysis, and Big Data as well as the opportunities for cross-disciplinary research and development. The workshop brings together academic researchers, SMEs, and the Public Sector to exchange knowledge and outline project proposals in Digital Humanities.

Co-organisers:

Professor Barbara Fennel, Department of Linguistics
b.a.fennell@abdn.ac.uk

Dr Adam Wyner, Department of Computing Sciences
azwyner@abdn.ac.uk

Workshop Schedule:

  • 12:00-12:30 Registration/Lunch
  • 12:30-13:30 Session 1 Public Policy-making Practice (C. Cottrill) and Policy-making Support Tools (A. Wyner)
  • 13:30-14:30 Session 2 Deliberative Democracy in Action (M. Oliver) and Text Analysis, News Media, and Psychiatry (N. Akhtar)
  • 14:30-15:00 Coffee break
  • 15.00-16:00 Session 3 Big Data (A. Goker)
  • 16.00-17:00 Roundup

    • Presenters:

  • Caitlin Cottrill, Lecturer, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Aberdeen. Caitlin will outline her knowledge about and experience in a range of policy-making contexts, particularly in domains of transportation and the environment. She will discuss some current issues and trends in policy-making.
  • Nooreen Akhtar, Research Training Fellow, Department of Applied Medicine, University of Aberdeen. Nooreen will discuss her investigations of how patients, public and stakeholders perceive and interpret information about anti-depressants in UK newspapers. It uses computational linguistic analysis and face-to-face interviews.
  • Matthew Oliver, Unlock Democracy. Unlock Democracy promotes deliberative, participatory, and transparent democratic activities by organising meetings and making available web-based tools to inform the public. Matthew is a Press and Project Manager and National Coordinator at Unlock Democracy. He will discuss aspects of Unlock Democracy and deliberative democracy.
  • Adam Wyner, Lecturer, Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen. Adam’s research interests are in the intersection of Law, Logic, Computer Science, and Language. Adam will present aspects of web-based tools to support deliberative, public policy-making, along with the analysis of legal materials.
  • Ayse Goker, Professor, School of Computing Science and Digital Media, Robert Gordon University. Ayse’s research interests are driven by a desire to research and improve information access and retrieval for users. Ayse has been the Principal Investigator of a range of UK and EU projects. Most recently, all the Scottish University Computing schools are partners through SICSA on the Innovation Centre bid for Data Science, with Robert Gordon University as its proposed NorthEast hub.

    • Shortlink to this page.
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    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}
    }
    Shortlink to this page.
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    ICAIL 2013 Papers

    I’m co-author of three papers at The 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013), Rome, Italy, The Netherlands.
    Il Colloseo, Rome, Italy
    OASIS LegalRuleML
    Tara Athan, Harold Boley, Guido Governatori, Monica Palmirani, Adrian Paschke, Adam Wyner
    Abstract
    In this paper we present the motivation, use cases, design principles, abstract syntax, and initial core of LRML. The LRML core is sufficiently rich for expressing legal sources, time, defeasibility, and deontic operators. An example is provided. LRML is compared to related work.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{AthanEtAl2013,
    author = {Tara Athan and Harold Boley and Guido Governatori and Monica Palmirani and Adrian Paschke and Adam Wyner},
    title = {{OASIS} {L}egal{R}ule{ML}},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013)},
    year = {2013},
    pages = {3-12},
    address = {Rome, Italy}
    }
    Argument Schemes for Reasoning with Legal Cases Using Values
    Trevor Bench-Capon, Henry Prakken, Adam Wyner, and Katie Atkinson
    Abstract
    Argument schemes can provide a means of explicitly describing reasoning methods in a form that lends itself to computation. The reasoning required to distinguish cases in the manner of CATO has been previously captured as a set of argument schemes. Here we present argument schemes that encapsulate another way of reasoning with cases: using preferences between social values revealed in past decisions to decide cases which have no exact matching precedents when the cases are described in terms of factors. We provide a set of schemes, with variations to capture different ways of comparing sets and varying degrees of promotion of values; we formalise these schemes; and we illustrate them with some examples.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{BenchCaponPrakkenWynerAtkinsonValueCBR2013,
    author = {Trevor Bench-Capon and Henry Prakken and Adam Wyner and Katie Atkinson},
    title = {Argument Schemes for Reasoning about Legal Cases},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013)},
    year = {2013},
    pages = {13-22},
    address = {Rome, Italy}
    }
    Argumentation Based Tools for Policy-Making
    Maya Wardeh, Adam Wyner, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Katie Atkinson
    Abstract
    Short paper, so no abstract.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{WardehWynerAtkinsonBenchCaponDemos2013,
    author = {Maya Wardeh and Adam Wyner and Trevor Bench-Capon and Katie Atkinson},
    title = {Argumentation Based Tools for Policy-Making},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2013)},
    year = {2013},
    pages = {249-250},
    address = {Rome, Italy}
    }
    Shortlink to this page.
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    Psychological Studies of Policy Reasoning

    The New York Times had an article on the difficulties that the public has to understand complex policy proposals – I’m Right (For Some Reason). The points in the article relate directly to the research I’ve been doing at Liverpool on the IMPACT Project, for we decompose a policy proposal into its constituent parts for examination and improved understanding. See our tool live: Structured Consultation Tool
    Policy proposals are often presented in an encapsulated form (a sound bite). And those receiving it presume that they understand it, the illusion of explanatory depth discussed in a recent article by Frank Keil (a psychology professor at Cornell when and where I was a Linguistics PhD student). This is the illusion where people believe they understand a complex phenomena with greater precision, coherence, and depth than they actually do; they overestimate their understanding. To philosophers, this is hardly a new phenomena, but showing it experimentally is a new result.
    In research about public policy, the NY Times authors, Sloman and Fernbach, describe experiments where people state a position and then had to justify it. The results showed that participants softened their views as a result, for their efforts to justify it highlighted the limits of their understanding. Rather than statements of policy proposals, they suggest:

    Instead, we voters need to be more mindful that issues are complicated and challenge ourselves to break down the policy proposals on both sides into their component parts. We have to then imagine how these ideas would work in the real world — and then make a choice: to either moderate our positions on policies we don’t really understand, as research suggests we will, or try to improve our understanding.

    Breaking down policy proposals into component parts for further investigation and understanding is exactly what we’ve been doing in the IMPACT Project.
    This article and the references to further literature are not only intrinsically interesting, but they also give me additional ways of thinking about these issues and an evaluative paradigm for our tools.

    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}
    }
    Shortlink to this page.
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    Oxford Internet Institute

    My attention was drawn to the Oxford Internet Institute:

    The Oxford Internet Institute was founded in 2001 at the University of Oxford, as an academic centre for the study of the societal implications of the Internet.
    In the last forty years the Internet has grown from an arcane and specialized academic service to the sophisticated global network of networks we see today: during this period the complexity of its societal implications has become ever more obvious, as well as the many ways it shapes our lives. Grounded in a determination to measure, understand and explain the Internet’s multi-faceted interactions and effects, our research projects bring together some of the best international scholars within a multi-disciplinary department in one of the world’s top research universities. We are committed to being an informed, independent and nonpartisan source of the highest quality analysis and insight in all our research and policy-related activities.

    The institute recently organised a conference on Internet, Politics, Policy 2012: Big Data, Big Challenges, where there were some papers bearing on policy-making. These are topics closely related to research that I do. An organisation worth following in the future.

    Dead Cert – BBC Podcast about Uncertainty in Public Discourse

    BBC Radio 4 has a 30 minute radio show about uncertainty in public discourse. Several of the points were well made and relevant to key lines of research that I do (argumentation, policy-making), so I thought it worthwhile to give a link here.
    The main questions that caught my attention were:

    • How do we (public, experts, and politicians) make public decisions where there is uncertainty?
    • How are problems and proposals presented by different organisations (politicians, experts, and journalists)?

    All the content below is from the BBC. The link below should take you to the BBC site and start the presentation. However, there might be some restrictions on access from outside the UK.
    – Adam
    Certainty: is the lust for it a sin? And if so, should politics fear for its soul? Michael Blastland makes a plea for policy makers to be less sure of themselves in “Dead Cert”, originally broadcast on 6 November 2008.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/analysis/all#playepisode21

    Papers at ITBAM 2012, ePart 2012, and EKAW 2012

    Recent papers at various conferences. One is in the 3rd International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics (ITBAM 2012), Vienna, Austria. Another is in the 4th International Conference on eParticipation (ePart 2012), Kristainsand, Norway. And a final paper is in the 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Galway, Ireland.
    Argumentation to represent and reason over biological systems
    Adam Wyner, Luke Riley, Robert Hoehndorf, and Samuel Croset.
    Abstract
    In systems biology, networks represent components of biological systems and their interactions. It is a challenge to efficiently represent, integrate and analyse the wealth of information that is now being created in biology, where issues concerning consistency arise. As well, the information offers novel methods to explain and explore biological phenomena. To represent and reason with inconsistency as well as provide explanation, we represent a fragment of a biological system and its interactions in terms of a computational model of argument and argumentation schemes. Process pathways are represented in terms of an argumentation scheme, then abstracted into a computational model for evaluation, yielding sets of ‘consistent’ arguments that represent compatible biological processes. From the arguments, we can extract the corresponding processes. We show how the analysis supports explanation and systematic exploration in a biology network.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{WynerEtAlITBAM2012,
    author = {Adam Wyner and Riley, Luke and Robert Hoehndorf and Samuel Croset},
    title = {Argumentation to Represent and Reason over Biological Systems},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics ({ITBAM} 2012)},
    year = {2012},
    note = {To appear},
    }
    Model based critique of policy proposals
    Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
    Abstract
    Citizens may engage with policy issues both to critique official justifications, and to make their own proposals and receive reasons why they are not favoured. Either direction of use can be supported by argumentation schemes based on formal models, which can be used to verify and generate arguments, assimilate objections etc. Previously we have explored the citizen critiqing a justification using an argumentation scheme based on Alternating Action-based Transition Systems. We now present a system which uses the same model to critique proposals from citizens. A prototype has been implemented in Prolog and we illustrate the ideas with code fragments and a running example.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{WynerABCEPart2012,
    author = {Adam Wyner and Atkinson, Katie and Trevor Bench-Capon},
    title = {Model Based Critique of Policy Proposals},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on e{P}articipation (e{P}art 2012)},
    year = {2012},
    note = {To appear},
    }
    Dimensions of argumentation in social media
    Jodi Schneider, Brian Davis, and Adam Wyner
    Abstract
    Mining social media for opinions is important to governments and businesses. Current approaches focus on sentiment and opinion detection. Yet, people also justify their views, giving arguments. Understanding arguments in social media would yield richer knowledge about the views of individuals and collectives. Extracting arguments from social media is difficult. Messages appear to lack indicators for argument, document structure, or inter-document relationships. In social media, lexical variety, alternative spellings, multiple languages, and alternative punctuation are common. Social media also encompasses numerous genres. These aspects can confound the extraction of well-formed knowledge bases of argument. We chart out the various aspects in order to isolate them for further analysis and processing.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{SchneiderEtAlEKAW2012,
    author = {Jodi Schneider and Davis, Brian and Adam Wyner},
    title = {Dimensions of Argumentation in Social Media},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management ({EKAW} 2012)},
    year = {2012},
    note = {To appear},
    }
    Shortlink to this page.
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    Papers at COMMA 2012

    At the 4th International Conference on Computational Models of Argumentation in Vienna, Austria, I have a short paper in the main conference and a paper in the demo session.
    Semi-automated argumentative analysis of online product reviews
    Adam Wyner, Jodi Schneider, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
    Abstract
    Argumentation is key to understanding and evaluating many texts. The arguments in the texts must be identified; using current tools, this requires substantial work from human analysts. With a rule-based tool for semi-automatic text analysis support, we facilitate argument identification. The tool highlights potential argumentative sections of a text according to terms indicative of arguments (e.g. suppose or therefore) and domain terminology (e.g. camera names and properties). The information can be used by an analyst to instantiate argumentation schemes and build arguments for and against a proposal. The resulting argumentation framework can then be passed to argument evaluation tools.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{WynerEtAlCOMMA2012a,
    author = {Adam Wyner and Schneider, Jodi and Katie Atkinson and Trevor Bench-Capon},
    title = {Semi-Automated Argumentative Analysis of Online Product Reviews},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computational
    Models of Argument ({COMMA} 2012)},
    year = {2012},
    note = {To appear},
    }
    Critiquing justifications for action using a semantic model: Demonstration
    Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
    Abstract
    The paper is two pages with no abstract.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{WynerABCDemoCOMMA2012,
    author = {Adam Wyner and Atkinson, Katie and Trevor Bench-Capon},
    title = {Critiquing Justifications for Action Using a Semantic Model: Demonstration},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument ({COMMA} 2012)},
    year = {2012},
    pages = {1-2},
    note = {To appear},
    }
    Shortlink to this page.
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    Papers at AAMAS 2012 and ArgMas 2012

    At the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems Conference in Valencia, Spain, I had a short paper in the main conference and a paper in the Argumentation in Multi-agent Systems Workshop
    Opinion gathering using a multi-agent systems approach to policy selection
    Katie Atkinson, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Adam Wyner
    Abstract
    An important aspect of e-democracy is consultation, in which policy proposals are presented and feedback from citizens is received and assimilated so that these proposals can be refined and made more acceptable to the citizens affected by them. We present an innovative web-based application that uses recent developments in multi-agent systems (MAS) to provide intelligent support for opinion gathering, eliciting a structured critique within a highly usable system.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{AtkinsonBCW-AAMAS2012,
    author = {Katie Atkinson and Trevor Bench-Capon and Adam Wyner},
    title = {Opinion Gathering Using a Multi-Agent Systems Approach to Policy
    Selection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of AAMAS 2012},
    year = {2012},
    editor = {Vincent Conitzer and Winikoff, Michael and Wiebe van der Hoek and
    Lin Padgham},
    pages = {1171-1172}
    }
    A functional perspective on argumentation schemes
    Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
    Abstract
    In multi-agent systems (MAS), abstract argumentation and argumentation schemes are increasingly important. To be useful for MAS, argumentation schemes require a computational approach so that agents can use the components of a scheme to present arguments and counterarguments. This paper proposes a syntactic analysis that integrates argumentation schemes with abstract argumentation. Schemes can be analysed into the roles that propositions play in each scheme and the structure of the associated propositions, yielding a greater understanding of the schemes, a uniform method of analysis, and a systematic means to relate one scheme to another. This analysis of the schemes helps to clarify what is needed to provide denotations of the terms and predicates in a semantic model.
    Bibtex
    @INPROCEEDINGS{WynerABCArgMAS2012,
    author = {Adam Wyner and Atkinson, Katie and Trevor Bench-Capon},
    title = {A Functional Perspective on Argumentation Schemes},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Argumentation in
    Multi-Agent Systems ({ArgMAS} 2012)},
    year = {2012},
    editor = {Peter McBurney and Parsons, Simon and Iyad Rahwan},
    pages = {203-222},
    }
    Shortlink to this page.
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.