Applications are invited for a position for a Ph.D. candidate to work on a research project in policy-related argument reconstruction and formalization, at The Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam. The candidate must have “a background in computational linguistics, or artificial intelligence, with an interest in argumentation. Experience with semantic web technology and practical IT skills are an advantage. Candidates should be proficient in English.”
The position is in connection with IMPACT (Improving Access to Text), “an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme. [IMPACT] 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.
“The candidate will be working on the design of an argument reconstruction tool, which uses a library of argumentation schemes to support the manual reconstruction of arguments from natural language texts. Moreover, an extension of existing XML formats for weblogs, such as RSS or Atom, will be developed which would enable future weblogs to mark up the structure of arguments in articles in such a way as to enable the arguments to be automatically aggregated, analysed and visualized, without human intervention. The extension may be based on the argument elements of the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) developed previously by the partners in the ESTRELLA project (IST-2004-027655). The research will result in several publications, including a PhD thesis.”
For more information, please see the position announcement.
HT Dr. Radboud Winkels.
