Floris sent me a link to this advert for a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law. The advert relates to a new FP7 project called IMPACT (not to be confused with Chris’ IMM-PACT EPSRC funded project) which aims to do the following:
IMPACT is an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme. It will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.
What is of particular interest to me is the idea of building new tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources on the web – very similar to the argument blogging approach to online argumentation that I have been working on recently. The main difference here though is that the prospective IMPACT tools appear to be aimed at working with the web as a static resource whereas argument blogging is meant to be an active, user-centered activity, although one extension that I am looking at is to integrate active, “no I disagree because…” type arguments with “and here is a resource to prove it…” type arguments, which I see as being a mixture of both active and static argumentation. Also similar is Mark’s OVA software, an online argument analysis tool similar to Araucaria, although currently this can only be used to analyse a single web resource not collate and resuse arguments across multiple sources.
Interestingly this project will use the LKIF, understandable given the domain in which the project is to be executed, but it makes me wonder about the possibility of tools to translate between AIF & LKIF so that resources from one domain can be accessed by tools from the other and vice versa.
