Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games

An important skill in critical thinking and argumentation is the ability to spot and recognize fallacies. Fallacious arguments, omnipresent in argumentative discourse, can be deceptive, manipulative, or simply leading to `wrong moves' in a discussion. Despite their importance, argumentation scholars and NLP researchers with focus on argumentation quality have not yet investigated fallacies empirically. The nonexistence of resources dealing with fallacious argumentation calls for scalable approaches to data acquisition and annotation, for which the serious games methodology offers an appealing, yet unexplored, alternative. We present Argotario, a serious game that deals with fallacies in everyday argumentation. Argotario is a multilingual, open-source, platform-independent application with strong educational aspects, accessible at www.argotario.net.Comment: EMNLP 2017 demo paper. Source codes: https://github.com/UKPLab/argotari

FrameASt: A framework for second-level agenda setting in parliamentary debates through the lens of comparative agenda topics

This paper presents a framework for studying second-level political agenda setting in parliamentary debates, based on the selection of policy topics used by political actors to discuss a specific issue on the parliamentary agenda. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic as an agenda item can be contextualised as a health issue or as a civil rights issue, as a matter of macroeconomics or can be discussed in the context of social welfare. Our framework allows us to observe differences regarding how different parties discuss the same agenda item by emphasizing different topical aspects of the item. We apply and evaluate our framework on data from the German Bundestag and discuss the merits and limitations of our approach. In addition, we present a new annotated data set of parliamentary debates, following the coding schema of policy topics developed in the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), and release models for topic classification in parliamentary debates

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Ausprägungen elektronischer Beteiligung in Industrie- und Entwicklungsländern : Ein anwendungsorientierter Vergleich am Beispiel Deutschland und Kenia

Partizipation ist ein etabliertes Element der partizipatorischen Demokratie. Immer wieder werden Mechanismen entwickelt, um Partizipation zu erhöhen und zu festigen. Mit Hilfe der voranschreitenden Entwicklung von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien, eröffnen sich neue Möglichkeiten von Partizipationsansätzen. Diese finden auch zunehmend weltweiten Einsatz. Neue partizipatorische Formen verwenden ICT als Mittel zur Unterstützung der Partizipation (E-Partizipation). In welche Bahnen E-Partizipation bereits gelenkt wurde ist Gegenstand dieser Arbeit. Sie setzt sich mit der Ausprägung vorhandener E-Partizipationsformen auseinander und betrachtet dabei anwendungsbezogene Projekte. Das Untersuchungsumfeld wurde dabei auf einen Ländervergleich festgelegt. Es handelt sich um einen Vergleich zwischen Deutschland, als repräsentatives Industrieland und Kenia, als Repräsentant für ein Entwicklungsland. Dafür wird, mit Hilfe einer historischen und anwendungsorientierten Betrachtung der E-Partizipation in den Ländern, ein Kontext aufgestellt. Mit dessen Hilfe werden die E-Partizipationsbestrebungen in Deutschland und Kenia anschließend mittels einer aufgestellten Klassifikation vergleichend gegenübergestellt. Die Analyse zeigt, dass deutsche Projekte vermehrt staatlich (Top-Down) initiiert sind, wo-hingegen in Kenia häufiger eine nicht-staatliche Ausrichtung (Ground-Up) existent ist. Weiterhin ist in kenianischen Projekten die Form "Transparenz durch Dritte" stärker ausgeprägt, in Deutschland ist es hingegen die konsultative Form. Im Bereich des fokussierten Bedürfnisses überwiegt in Deutschland die soziale Bedürfnisbefriedung, während in Kenia auch noch Sicherheitsbedürfnisse bedeutsam sind. Im Bereich der ICT-Form zeigt sich eine ähnliche Verteilung innerhalb der Länder bei den Formen Alert, FAQ und Forum. Partielle Unterschiede sind in den Formen Blog und Bewertung ausgeprägt, starke Differenzen existieren dagegen bei den Formen Chat, Umfrage und Spiel als Partizipationsmittel. Für letztere gilt, dass Chat und Umfrage nur in deutschen und das Spiel nur in kenianischen Projekten verwendet wurden. Political participation is one of the primary pillars of democracy. Therefore, new methods are developed to initiate and improve political participation. The rapid developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) open new possibilities for different forms of participation. The new methods are already integrated in projects around the world. These forms are using ICT as a medium to support political participation (e-participation). The thesis analyzes the historical and practical development of e-participation in Germany and Kenya, and aims to make a comparison to find differences between an industrial and a developing country, because both have the same responsibility as a democracy to integrated political participation. The thesis will give an historical and practical context of e-participation in both countries. And with the knowledge of the context the practical forms of e-participation will be compared with a classification. The classification includes three aspects of e-participation: the form of political participation, the ICT-form and the needs which will be addressed. The analysis shows that in Germany more projects are initiated by the state (top-down) than in Kenya (ground-up). The analysis shows also that there are more e-participation projects in Kenya with the participation form transparence through third. In Germany are more consultation projects in contrast to Kenya. If the focus will be on the citizens' needs, it can be identified that the need for security is often addressed in Kenya, whereas in Germany all projects aimed at social needs. In addition, the ICT-Forms alert, FAQ and forum are similar frequented in both countries. However differences can be pronounced in the forms blog and evaluation. There are also stronger differences in the forms chat, survey and game - chat and survey are only used in Germany and game is only integrated in Kenyan projects

Ausprägungen elektronischer Beteiligung in Industrie- und Entwicklungsländern: Ein anwendungsorientierter Vergleich am Beispiel Deutschland und Kenia

Political participation is one of the primary pillars of democracy. Therefore, new methods are developed to initiate and improve political participation. The rapid developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) open new possibilities for different forms of participation. The new methods are already integrated in projects around the world. These forms are using ICT as a medium to support political participation (e-participation). The thesis analyzes the historical and practical development of e-participation in Germany and Kenya, and aims to make a comparison to find differences between an industrial and a developing country, because both have the same responsibility as a democracy to integrated political participation. The thesis will give an historical and practical context of e-participation in both countries. And with the knowledge of the context the practical forms of e-participation will be compared with a classification. The classification includes three aspects of e-participation: the form of political participation, the ICT-form and the needs which will be addressed. The analysis shows that in Germany more projects are initiated by the state (top-down) than in Kenya (ground-up). The analysis shows also that there are more e-participation projects in Kenya with the participation form transparence through third. In Germany are more consultation projects in contrast to Kenya. If the focus will be on the citizens' needs, it can be identified that the need for security is often addressed in Kenya, whereas in Germany all projects aimed at social needs. In addition, the ICT-Forms alert, FAQ and forum are similar frequented in both countries. However differences can be pronounced in the forms blog and evaluation. There are also stronger differences in the forms chat, survey and game - chat and survey are only used in Germany and game is only integrated in Kenyan projects

Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates

This paper investigates the identification of populist rhetoric in text and presents a novel cross-lingual dataset for this task. Our work is based on the definition of populism as a "communication style of political actors that refers to the people" but also includes anti-elitism as another core feature of populism. Accordingly, we annotate references to The People and The Elite in German and English parliamentary debates with a hierarchical scheme. The paper describes our dataset and annotation procedure and reports inter-annotator agreement for this task. Next, we compare and evaluate different transformer-based model architectures on a German dataset and report results for zero-shot learning on a smaller English dataset. We then show that semi-supervised tri-training can improve results in the cross-lingual setting. Our dataset can be used to investigate how political actors talk about The Elite and The People and to study how populist rhetoric is used as a strategic device

Comparison of e-participation roadmap in industrial and developing countries based on Germany and Kenya

This paper compares the E-Participation roadmaps of industrial and developing countries, based on Germany and Kenya as representatives. Therefore, the ICT roadmap of each country is de-scribed in a clear shape and with representative E-Participation projects of each country. Based on these projects, the comparison is performed on a categorical level in terms of (1) participation forms, (2) used ICT, and (3) socio-political requirements. After-wards, the results are summarized to determine an overall view on the E-Participation situation in both countries. As a result of the comparison similarities and significant differences will be identified. The results are useful for software developing organizations that want to create ICT governance tools for industrial as well as developing countries and therefore need to consider the characteristics and requirements of both country types

Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games

An important skill in critical thinking and argumentation is the ability to spot and recognize fallacies. Fallacious arguments, omnipresent in argumentative discourse, can be deceptive, manipulative, or simply leading to 'wrong moves' in a discussion. Despite their importance, argumentation scholars and NLP researchers with focus on argumentation quality have not yet investigated fallacies empirically. The nonexistence of resources dealing with fallacious argumentation calls for scalable approaches to data acquisition and annotation, for which the serious games methodology offers an appealing, yet unexplored, alternative. We present Argotario, a serious game that deals with fallacies in everyday argumentation. Argotario is a multilingual, open-source, platform-independent application with strong educational aspects, accessible at www.argotario.net