Argument Technology is that part of the overlap between theories of argumentation and reasoning and those of AI where an engineering focus leads to applications and tools that are deployed. One significant step in the past decade has been the development of the Argument Web — the idea that many of these tools can interact using common infrastructure, with benefits to academic, commercial and public user groups. More recently, there has been a move towards linguistic aspects of argument, with NLP techniques facilitating the development of the field of Argument Mining. Drawing on the academic success and commercial uptake of techniques such as opinion mining and sentiment analysis, argument mining seeks to build on systems which use data mining to summarise*what* people think by explaining also *why* they hold the opinions they do.
Chris Reed is Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Dundee in Scotland, where he heads the Centre for Argument Technology. Chris has been working at the overlap between argumentation theory and artificial intelligence for over twenty years, has won £6m in funding and has over 200 publications in the area. He collaborates with a wide range of partners such as IBM and the BBC, and is also active in public engagement and commercialisation of research, having served as executive director (CTO, CSO and CEO) of three start-up companies, and appearing in TV, radio and print media with a combined audience in excess of 29 million people.
