News

06/22: Three papers accepted to ECA2022
Looking forward to presenting our work on a variety of aspects of modeling rhetorical strategies for debate at the European Conference on Argumentation in Rome in September 2022. 

05/22: The second VEUK price winner in the group
After Wassiliki Siskou in 2019, Zlata Kikteva is the second PhD student in the group to win the University of Konstanz's prize for outstanding international MA students, awarded to Zlata in May 2022. Congratulations to both!

05/22: Manuscript accepted to 'International Public Management Journal'
Work that is coming out of the PSE Project, entitled 'A taxonomy of administrative language in public service encounters' (co-authors: Steffen Eckhard, Laurin Friedrich, Vanessa Müden, Ingrid Espinoza). More to follow!

05/22: Project meeting in Brussels
Another DeLab project meeting, this time at Maastricht University's Brussel campus - looking forward to seeing everyone in person again!

05/22: Chris Reed and Kamila Gorska are visiting
We're delighted to host two members of ARG-tech for a one-week research visit in Passau!

04/22: Two LREC 2022 papers
We're looking forward to presenting two papers at LREC 2022 in Marseille: A main conference paper /w oral presentation ("QT30: A corpus of argument and conflict in broadcast debate") and a workshop paper ("Disagreement space in argument analysis") in the Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP

03/22: Dagstuhl seminar "Framing in Communication: From Theories to Computation"
A great week of working with colleagues across disciplines on how to operationalise framing!

01/22: In Passau now
I'm delighted to be starting my post as Junior Professor for Computational Rhetoric and Natural Language Processing. 

12/21: Teaching @RUB
It was a pleasure to contribute an afternoon of 'Argumentation in political debate' in the seminar series on 'Digital analysis of large text corpora' at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. 

11/21: Article in the Journal of Pragmatics
In 'Questions in argumentative dialogue' we present a taxonomy for questioning that has been applied to corpora comprising over two million words and we yield statistical profiles that illustrate the rhetorical effect of questions in argumentative natural language.

11/21: ARGAGE conference
Katarzyna Budzynska, Chris Reed and me have a joint talk at the ARGAGE conference 2021 on 'What is too much implicitness in argumentation?'.

10/21: ARG-tech, Pindex and Stephen Fry on argument technology
ARG-tech has been working with Pindex on a new video that explains the context and motivation for a lot of work in argument technology. Stephen Fry narrates and opens with a discussion of some of the big societal challenges including conspiracy theories and fake news. The video is out now on on YouTube.

10/21: Teaching at University of Passau
Before my official start in January, I'm already offering two courses at the Faculty for Computer Science and Mathematics this semester: Information Retrieval & Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence (block seminar, March 2022). All materials are on Stud.IP. See you there!

08/21: DeLab starts, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung
DeLab is officially starting, running until 07/25, and we're looking forward to develop the 'Deliberation Laboratory', an environment to test the effect of different rhetorical strategies on debate quality on the web. Zlata Kikteva is the PhD student for the KN group. Looking forward!

06/21: Paper accepted at the UnImplicit workshop @ ACL 2021.
Looking forward to presenting our study on the variability of conventional implicated content in English and German at The First Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language, co-located with ACL 2021!

05/21: Professor for Computational Rhetorics and Natural Language Processing from 01/22 onwards
I'm delighted to be starting the next chapter of my academic life, joining the Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics at the University of Passau on 1 January 2022. I'm equally delighted that Zlata Kikteva and Wassiliki Siskou will join the fun as PhD students!

04/21: New semester @uni.kn, new courses.
I'm teaching AI and Grammar Development and offer a Research Colloquium this summer term - all materials are on Ilias. Looking forward to seeing many of your there!

03/21: Invited talk @ ILCC, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Happy to speak about 'What is too much implicitness?' on 26 March as part of the ILCC seminar series and meet staff and students (at least virtually) - already looking forward to coming by in person again!

02/21: And another one! PSE project, starting in spring 2021, funded by the Excellence Cluster @uni.kn
Excited about a new PolSci collaboration with Steffen Eckhard on the linguistic analysis of street-level bureaucracy and the inequality inherent in it. See the webpage here.

01/21: New collaboration! MOU with the University of Verona
In this Memorandum of Understanding, I am teaming up with Roberta Facchinetti, Silvia Cavalieri and Sara Corrizzato from the University of Verona, Italy, on understanding and annotating the role of questions in a new corpus on political interviews. Biljana Scott joins the team as scientific advisor.

12/20: New project! Deliberation Laboratory (DeLab), funded by the VolkswagenStiftung, starting 04/2021.
I'm delighted to be part of DeLab, a project in the 'AI and the Society of the Future' call of the VolkswagenStiftung. We aim to develop a transformative online experimentation environment that will allow us to explore the nature, causes, and consequences of citizens’ perceptions in public, online dialogue across languages. More information to come soon!

11/20: New book! LingVis: Visual Analytics for Linguistics, edited by Miriam Butt, Annette Hautli-Janisz and Verena Lyding, CSLI Publications, Stanford
This volume collects landmark research in the burgeoning field of visual analytics for linguistics (LingVis). LingVis is motivated by the growing need within linguistic research for dealing with large amounts of complex, multidimensional data sets. An innovative exploration into the future of LingVis in the digital age, this foundational book both provides a representation of the current state of the field and communicates its new possibilities for addressing complex linguistic questions across the larger linguistic community.