The tutorial will be delivered jointly between four leading researchers in the field:
- Iryna Gurevych is Full Professor of Natural Language Processing in the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universit ̈at (TU) Darmstadt. She heads the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab and the Research Trainng Group “Adaptive Information Preparation from Heterogeneous Sources” ($1m p.a.) at the TU Darmstadt and Univ. of Heidelberg. Iryna has been working in the areas of lexical-semantic processing, discourse analysis and text mining with applications in social sciences and humanities for about 15 years. Her research interests have recently shifted towards NLP approaches to argumentation analysis. She is supervising several students working in this area and has published on this topic in the recent EMNLP, COLING and other confer- ences. Iryna has been co-organizer of the NAACL 2015 workshop on Argumentation Mining and the Dagstuhl seminar “Debating Technologies” in December 2015, she will co-organize the ACL 2016 workshop on Argument Mining in Berlin and co-chair the Debating Technologies track.
- Chris Reed is Full Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Dundee in Scotland, where he heads the Centre for Argument Technology. Chris has been working at the overlap between argumentation theory and artificial intelligence for over twenty years, has won over £5.6m of funding from government and commercial sources and has over 140 peer-reviewed papers in the area including five books. He has also been instrumental in the development of the Argument Interchange Format, an international standard for computational work in the area; he is spear-heading the major engineering effort behind the Argument Web; and he is a founding editor of the Journal of Argument & Computation. He was co-organiser of COMMA 2014, of the first ACL workshop on Argumentation Mining in 2014, will be chair of the third workshop on Argument Mining with ACL in 2016, and has recently won funding for a £1m project on the topic in collaboration with IBM.
- Noam Slonim is a Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) at IBM Research. He serves as the IBM Research Technical Lead of topics related to debating technologies, leading a team of more than 40 researches from several different IBM Research Labs around the world. His main research interest is in developing innovative applications that can enhance, support, and engage with human debating. Correspondingly, he coined the term “Debate Technologies”, and is actively pursuing specific research questions around that area, mainly in the context of developing advanced text analysis applications. From a theoretical perspective, his research over the years has led to the development of various Machine Learning techniques for the analysis of textual and genomic data, that often stem from Information Theoretic concepts and algorithms. Noam has re- cently published at ACL, EMNLP, and COLING. He has been a co-organizer of the Dagstuhl seminar “Debating Technologies” in December 2015, and is a co- organizer of the ACL 2016 workshop on Argument Mining in Berlin and co-chair of the Debating Technologies track.
- Benno Stein is chair of the Web Technology and Information Systems Group at the Bauhaus-Universit ̈at Weimar. His research focuses on theory and algo- rithms for information retrieval, information extraction, and data mining. Since 2008 his group applies Big Data technology for research related to retrieval and extraction tasks. Among others, the group has developed effective and efficient methods for cross-language text reuse, document clustering, paraphrasing, and sentiment analysis. Benno is chair of the international workshop series TIR on Text-based Information Retrieval, initiator and co-organizer of PAN, a research network dedicated to digital text forensics. He is co-founder and spokesman of the Digital Bauhaus Lab, a forthcoming interdisciplinary research center with advanced working environments for research in Computer Science, Engineering, and Media Art and Design.