The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

Reasoning is a crucial part of natural language argumentation. To comprehend an argument, one must analyze its warrant, which explains why its claim follows from its premises. As arguments are highly contextualized, warrants are usually presupposed and left implicit. Thus, the comprehension does not only require language understanding and logic skills, but also depends on common sense. In this paper we develop a methodology for reconstructing warrants systematically. We operationalize it in a scalable crowdsourcing process, resulting in a freely licensed dataset with warrants for 2k authentic arguments from news comments. On this basis, we present a new challenging task, the argument reasoning comprehension task. Given an argument with a claim and a premise, the goal is to choose the correct implicit warrant from two options. Both warrants are plausible and lexically close, but lead to contradicting claims. A solution to this task will define a substantial step towards automatic warrant reconstruction. However, experiments with several neural attention and language models reveal that current approaches do not suffice.Comment: Accepted as NAACL 2018 Long Paper; see details on the front pag

The euro – more than just a currency. Bertelsmann Impulse #2015/01

Working together is worthwhile; growing together even more so. After more than 20 years of the single market and 15 years of monetary union, the members of the European Union – once referred to as the European Community – are interwoven. Indeed, they are very closely interconnected. Despite this, in the face of heated debates arising once again over a looming sovereign default by Greece, there is once again an uneasy feeling about having to pay up for the debts of other member states. In Germany, the largest contributor country, the willingness to act in solidarity is steadily decreasing. And this is despite the fact that Germany profits from the euro in many ways. Even in the country with the strongest economy, many are asking themselves whether this is the beginning of the end for the euro zone

Fibrin Clot Delivery System for Meniscal Repair

As meniscal preservation particularly in younger active individuals with a symptomatic meniscal tear remains the preferred treatment option, various methods have been suggested to increase healing and success rates after meniscal repair. The recent increase in clinical use of platelet rich plasma has contributed to the increased use of fibrin clot, which virtually has the same healing property. However, despite the relative ease of acquisition and preparation of fibrin clots, delivering it to the desired target area arthroscopically is challenging. Therefore, we report with a pertinent literature review a novel method of planting a fibrin clot to the desired area of meniscal tear arthroscopically using our delivery system to enhance healing

From the Archive to the Computer: Michel Foucault and the Digital Humanities

Michel Foucault famously introduced the method of “discourse analysis” in the humanities, especially in historiography. In his _Archaeology of Knowledge_, originally published in 1969, in particular, Foucault argues for making the history of knowledge the object of discourse analyses. In the context of the current surge of interest in discourse analysis in the field of computer science, however, there are hardly any references to Foucault, partly because he never defined a methodological process that could be operationalized. Nonetheless we argue for re-reading the _Archaeology of Knowledge_ in the context of computer science and the digital humanities. As a matter of fact, there are considerable affinities between Foucault’s search for the regularities of discourse and current projects dealing with the digitization of texts, their indexing, distributional features, stylometry, etc. We show that these projects were already quite prominent in Foucault’s day, to the point that historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie could assert, in 1968, that “the future historian will be a programmer.” A year later, Foucault’s _Archaeology of Knowledge_ actively responded and constructively took up the challenge – which, given the recent advances in machine learning and computational linguistics, strikes us as a crucial move today

How Germany Benefits from the Euro in Economic Terms. Policy Brief #2013/01

There can be no doubt about the fact that Germany benefits from the euro in a significant number of ways. For ex-ample, monetary union membership helps to reduce the cost of international trade, and provides protection against excessive exchange rate volatility. This means that even if Germany had to write off a large percentage of the loans that it has made available to the heavily indebted states of southern Europe as part of the various euro rescue measures, the economic advantages of its membership of the monetary union would continue to predominate. Reverting to the deutschmark would thus be disadvantageous even in purely economic terms

Field-level land-use data reveal heterogeneous crop sequences with distinct regional differences in Germany

Crop cultivation intensifies globally, which can jeopardize biodiversity and the resilience of cropping systems. We investigate changes in crop rotations as one intensification metric for half of the croplands in Germany with annual field-level land-use data from 2005 to 2018. We proxy crop rotations with crop sequences and compare how these sequences changed among three seven-year periods. The results reveal an overall high diversity of crop sequences in Germany. Half of the cropland has crop sequences with four or more crops within a seven-year period, while continuous cultivation of the same crop is present on only 2% of the cropland. Larger farms tend to have more diverse crop sequences and organic farms have lower shares of cereal crops. In three federal states, crop rotations became less structurally diverse over time, i.e. the number of crops and the number of changes between crops decreased. In one state, structural diversity increased and the proportion of monocropping decreased. The functional diversity of the crop sequences, which measures the share of winter and spring crops as well as the share of leaf and cereal crops per sequence, remained largely stable. Trends towards cereal- or leaf-crop dominated sequences varied between the states, and no clear overall dynamic could be observed. However, the share of winter crops per sequence decreased in all four federal states. Quantifying the dynamics of crop sequences at the field level is an important metric of land-use intensity and can reveal the patterns of land-use intensification