BBC's Radio 4 on Vagueness in Law

On the BBC Radio 4 Analysis program, there was an episode about the Sorities Paradoxes. These are the sorts of paradoxes that arise about categories that have no sharp boundaries:

One grain of sand is not a heap of sand; two grains of sand are not a heap of sand; …. ; adding one more grain of sand to some sand is not enough to make a heap of sand; yet, at some point, we agree we have a heap of sand.

So, where are the boundaries?
Part of what is interesting to me is that while we might have problems to provide a formal, systematic analysis, we seem to have strong intuitions that are (more or less, and in fact more, where all things are otherwise equal) in agreement with the intuitions of others.
In law, such issues about vagueness also arise, and they lead to legal contention, so are important to decide. In this radio broadcast, there is a fun discussion of the sorities paradoxes and some mention of how legislators address them; in particular, just how can legislators ‘define’ nudity?
Analysis Extra: The Philosopher’s Arms: Sorites’ Heap 10 Sep 2012
The program is about 30 minutes long and should play in your browser. The broadcast content is copyright the BBC. Radio 4 is great!

Presentation at LEX Summer School 2012

I was a lecturer at the LEX Summer School 2012 in Ravenna, Italy on September 14, 2012.
San Vitali Mosaic, Ravenna, Italy

The school aims at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, judiciary, parliamentary and administrative documents. The course provides understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative and administrative process, awareness of the tools based on legal XML standards and of their constellations, and the ability to participate in the drafting and use of standard-compliant documents throughout law-making process. In particular we would like to create consciousness in the stakeholders in the legal domain about the benefits and the possibilities provided by the correct usage of Semantic Web technologies such as XML standards, ontologies, natural language processing techniques applied to legal texts, legal knowledge modelling and reasoning tools.

The zipped file contains the slides and some exercise material.
The first lecture (Part 1) introduces the general topic, some samples of results, and a discussion about crowdsourcing annotations in legal cases. The second lecture (Part 2) discusses the parsing and semantic representation of a fragment of the British Nationality Act. The class materials are used for an in class exercise about annotation.
Port of Classe mosaic
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By Adam Wyner

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Paper at SWAIE 2012

A paper with Jodi Schneider accepted to 1st Workshop on Semantic Web and Information Extraction (SWAIE 2012) held at the 18th Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Galway, Ireland.
Identifying Consumers’ Arguments in Text
Jodi Schneider and Adam Wyner
Abstract
Product reviews are a corpus of textual data on consumer opinions. While reviews can be sorted by rating, there is limited support to search in the corpus for statements about particular topics, e.g. properties of a product. Moreover, where opinions are justified or criticised, statements in the corpus indicate arguments and counterarguments. Explicitly structuring these statements into arguments could help better understand customers’ disposition towards a product. We present a semi-automated, rule-based information extraction tool to support the identification of statements and arguments in a corpus, using: argumentation schemes; user, domain, and sentiment terminology; and discourse indicators.
Bibtex
@INPROCEEDINGS{WynerSchneiderSWAIE2012,
author = {Jodi Schneider and Adam Wyner},
title = {Identifying Consumers’ Arguments in Text},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semantic Web and Information Extraction (SWAIE 2012)},
year = {2012},
address = {Galway, Ireland},
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.

Video Lecture on Agreement Technologies and Argumentation

I participated in a recent Agreement Technologies (AT) meeting in June 2012 in Valencia, Spain; AT is a European Cooperation in Science and Technology funded organisation. As part of a new book with associated videolectures, I presented the videolecture Agreement Technologies and Argumentation, written by Sanjay Modgil and Francesca Toni, which has a runtime of just under 10 minutes. The other videolectures are good introductions to other areas of AT.

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}}
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner

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

Presentation on Argument Mining at the London Text Analytic Meetup

On July 13 at Fizzback HQ in London, I presented a talk at the London Text Analytic Meetup on Argument Mining. The slides are available at the link below.
Comments on Natural Language and Argumentation
Adam Wyner
Abstract
Opinion and sentiment mining of web-based content are widely done to find out the views of users about consumer goods or politics, but the techniques rely on accrual, do not identify justification, and do not provide structure to support reasoning. Argument mining provides an articulated view of web-based content, identifying justifications, counterpoints, and structure for reasoning.
Two other papers were presented at the meetup.
One by Francesca Toni and Lucas Carstens from Imperial College:
Sentiment Analysis is concerned with differentiating opinionated text from factual text and, in the case of opinionated text, determine its polarity. With this paper, we present A-SVM, a system that tackles the discrimination of opinionated text from non-opinionated text with the help of Support Vector Machines (SVM). In a two-step process, SVM classifications are improved via arguments, acquired by means of a user feedback mechanism. The system has been used to investigate the merits of approaching Sentiment Analysis in a multi faceted manner by comparing straightforward Machine Learning techniques with this multimodal system architecture. All evaluations were executed using a purpose-built corpus of annotated text and its classification performance was compared to that of SVM. The classification of a test set of approximately 12,000 words yielded an increase in classification precision of 5.6%.
Another paper by Francesca Toni and Valentinos Evripidou from Imperial College
We describe a new argumentation method for analysing opinion exchanges between on-line users aiding them to draw informative, structured and meaningful information. Our method combines different factors, such as social support drawn from votes and attacking/supporting relations between opinions interpreted as abstract arguments. We show a prototype web application which puts into use this method to offer anintelligent business directory allowing users to engage in debate and aid them to extract the dominant, emerging public opinion.
By Adam Wyner

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

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