Next Colloquium Loria will take place on Thursday, 24 February on Teams.

We are honored to welcome Serena Villata, Tenured researcher at CNRS at I3S, with a presentation entitled “Towards assessing natural language argument quality: results and open challenges”.

Abstract:

Argumentation is the process by which arguments are constructed and handled. Thus argumentation means that arguments are compared, evaluated in some respect and judged in order to establish whether any of them are warranted. The field of artificial argumentation is emerging as an important aspect of Artificial Intelligence research, in particular dealing with the automatic identification of argument structures in text. In this talk, I will focus on the issue of automatically assessing the quality of these identified natural language arguments. I will investigate the role of machine learning and reasoning methods to tackle this issue, focusing on the real world scenarios of political debates (with the assessment of fallacious arguments) and persuasive essays (for the scoring of students’ assays).

Biography:

I am a tenured research fellow (CR1) in computer science at the CNRS and I pursue my research at the I3S laboratory where I am a member of the joint Inria-CNRS-UCA Wimmics team.

My research area is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and my current work focuses on computational argumentation considering both reasoning on computational models of argument and mining natural arguments from text (argument mining). I am particularly interested in multidisciplinary applications of argumentation to the legal domain, to medical texts, to political debates and to social networks.

Since July 2019, I have been awarded with a Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence 3IA Côte d’Azur on “Artificial Argumentation for Humans”. Since January 2021, I am the Deputy Scientific Director of the 3IA Côte d’Azur Institute.

Since December 2019, I am a member of the National Pilot Committee for Digital Ethics(CNPEN), and since October 2020 I am a member of the Scientific and Ethical Committee of the Cancer Data Platform of the Institut National du Cancer.

I am part of the Steering Committee of COMMA (Computational Models of Arguments), JURIX (Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems) and ECA (European Conference on Argumentation). Since September 2021, I am a member of the IAAIL executive committee(2022-2023).