DebateKG: Automatic Policy Debate Case Creation with Semantic Knowledge Graphs

Recent work within the Argument Mining community has shown the applicability of Natural Language Processing systems for solving problems found within competitive debate. One of the most important tasks within competitive debate is for debaters to create high quality debate cases. We show that effective debate cases can be constructed using constrained shortest path traversals on Argumentative Semantic Knowledge Graphs. We study this potential in the context of a type of American Competitive Debate, called Policy Debate, which already has a large scale dataset targeting it called DebateSum. We significantly improve upon DebateSum by introducing 53180 new examples, as well as further useful metadata for every example, to the dataset. We leverage the txtai semantic search and knowledge graph toolchain to produce and contribute 9 semantic knowledge graphs built on this dataset. We create a unique method for evaluating which knowledge graphs are better in the context of producing policy debate cases. A demo which automatically generates debate cases, along with all other code and the Knowledge Graphs, are open-sourced and made available to the public here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/DebateKGComment: 8 pages, knife-edge reject from EACL 2023 and workshops, System Demonstration pape

The Role of Human Knowledge in Explainable AI

As the performance and complexity of machine learning models have grown significantly over the last years, there has been an increasing need to develop methodologies to describe their behaviour. Such a need has mainly arisen due to the widespread use of black-box models, i.e., high-performing models whose internal logic is challenging to describe and understand. Therefore, the machine learning and AI field is facing a new challenge: making models more explainable through appropriate techniques. The final goal of an explainability method is to faithfully describe the behaviour of a (black-box) model to users who can get a better understanding of its logic, thus increasing the trust and acceptance of the system. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art explainability approaches may not be enough to guarantee the full understandability of explanations from a human perspective. For this reason, human-in-the-loop methods have been widely employed to enhance and/or evaluate explanations of machine learning models. These approaches focus on collecting human knowledge that AI systems can then employ or involving humans to achieve their objectives (e.g., evaluating or improving the system). This article aims to present a literature overview on collecting and employing human knowledge to improve and evaluate the understandability of machine learning models through human-in-the-loop approaches. Furthermore, a discussion on the challenges, state-of-the-art, and future trends in explainability is also provided

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Countering Misinformation via Emotional Response Generation

The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms (SMPs) poses a significant danger to public health, social cohesion and ultimately democracy. Previous research has shown how social correction can be an effective way to curb misinformation, by engaging directly in a constructive dialogue with users who spread -- often in good faith -- misleading messages. Although professional fact-checkers are crucial to debunking viral claims, they usually do not engage in conversations on social media. Thereby, significant effort has been made to automate the use of fact-checker material in social correction; however, no previous work has tried to integrate it with the style and pragmatics that are commonly employed in social media communication. To fill this gap, we present VerMouth, the first large-scale dataset comprising roughly 12 thousand claim-response pairs (linked to debunking articles), accounting for both SMP-style and basic emotions, two factors which have a significant role in misinformation credibility and spreading. To collect this dataset we used a technique based on an author-reviewer pipeline, which efficiently combines LLMs and human annotators to obtain high-quality data. We also provide comprehensive experiments showing how models trained on our proposed dataset have significant improvements in terms of output quality and generalization capabilities.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023 main conferenc

Mobile lives, immutable facts : family reunification of children in Finland

Peer reviewe

The Information of Things: A Study on the Potential of Journalism with 5G Technology

This research conducted at the University of Barcelona explores the intersection of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), mobile 5G, and the Internet of Things (IoT) within journalistic frameworks, aiming to uncover the evolving dynamics in newsrooms influenced by these advancements. By employing methodologies such as bibliographic research for a theoretical exploration of IoT, AI, 5G, and participant observation with the Research Group on Information, Communication, and Culture, the study aims to offer a qualitative insight into the integration of these technologies in journalism. The study focuses on how AI-driven algorithms, 5G connectivity, and IoT devices are collectively transforming journalistic content creation and dissemination, offering new opportunities for enhanced efficiency and creativity while also introducing challenges in real-time data handling, analysis, and distribution. The expected results include a deeper understanding of the impact and potential of these technologies in journalism, emphasizing the need for transparency, accountability, and ethical practices to uphold journalistic integrity and promote informed public discourse amidst these technological advancements