Posted: 21st March 2016

We welcome Dr. Christiana Panayiotou to the Department of Computer Science, who has just joined the Information Systems group on a prestigious 2-years Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship to carry out research on probabilistic argumentation on the Web (ARGUE_WEB).

The development of technologies that enable the automatic extraction, representation, query answering, and reasoning of argumentative text from the Web is an important challenging (multidisciplinary) task that requires the integration of technologies and methods from natural language processing, query answering from the Web, and knowledge representation and reasoning.

The goal of the ARGUE_WEB project is to develop a scalable probabilistic argumentation formalism for the retrieval of points of view from argumentative text on the Web, principled management of these points of view, and query answering about these points of view.

For the achievement of this goal, existing ontological formalisms will be considered so that an appropriate representation formalism will be chosen and then extended both semantically and syntactically for the representation of arguments and probabilistic viewpoints.

The notion of a probabilistic argument will be defined and investigated formally and logicaly in the context of the inherent uncertainty of the Web, and a scalable approach will be followed that will include the development of a formalism for the representation of probabilistic arguments and its subsequent extension to support different points of view. An important aspect of the ARGUE_WEB project is the representation and management of different points of view. Another important aspect of the project will be the development of algorithms for ranking viewpoints and retrieving the top-k viewpoints.  The scientist in charge for this project is Thomas Lukasiewicz.